Dedicated website hosting

Dedicated web hosting is the ultimate in web hosting offering the most power, features and scalability. What’s more it has become far more affordable with prices from well under £100 a month.

In this article we’ll discuss the pros and cons of dedicated web hosting and how it could work for you and your business.

What is dedicated web hosting?

Unlike shared web hosting dedicated web hosting means that the server is dedicated to serving your website and no one else’s. You can configure and use the server to meet your specific business requirements.

What are the advantages of dedicated web hosting? There are many reasons businesses opt for dedicated web hosting here are some of the key points :

• Affordable options to suite most small to medium businesses.
• Dedicated hardware fully configurable to meet your specific needs.
• Setup and configure multiple sites and databases with minimal to no extra costs.
• Scalable by adding more memory, disks, CPU’s or even servers to meet your business demands.
• Hosted in a secure data center rather than your own infrastructure.
• Affordable and scalable bandwidth options.
• Some have easy to use online control panels to manage core aspects of your service.
• Basic maintenance and security usually managed by hosting provider.
• Fully managed plans take away some of the responsibility to do with security and backup.

What are the disadvantages of shared hosting?

Some of the disadvantages can be cost orientated however we often find the cost is outweighed by the benefits and requirements of your business.

• Costly compared to shared website hosting
• Configuration of server is often more complex and can require a professional.
• Should you need an engineer the cost of the hosting providers engineer can be phenomenal!
• Depending on the level of service and type of plan you sign up for you may need to take on more responsibility for issues such as security and backup.

So what should I choose?

There are a variety of off the shelf dedicated hosting providers operating regionally and some operatate internationally too. You should probably choose a provider who is close to your target audience. These off the shelf plans tend to be a good entry point for most small businesses getting started.

For more advanced dedicated web hosting such as multiple server setups, configurable firewall’s, etc. you may have to look a little further afield to and you may want to explore managed solutions if you do not have the in house expertise. While they tend to be on the more expensive side, if you have reach this level of scale and criticality, you don’t want to skimp on your provider to save a little.

With this in mind before commiting to a provider ensure they have a decent reputation especially in relation to support, as this will be critical if you ever have a problem. It’s also a good idea to see what additional support services they provide should you need hands on help with seting up or managing your server.

Conclusion

Dedicated hosting is a big step from shared hosting for a lot of small businesses and yet taking that step can open up doors new to performance, configurability and development probabilities.