Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is the weapon of choice for webmasters who want to run hundreds of sites, or who have one or two very large sites that demand significant resources. Examples of sites that benefit from a dedicated server include large discussion forums, high-traffic news sites, image upload sites, video hosting sites, et cetera.

Is it time to upgrade to dedicated hosting? Depending on the traffic levels of your website, it may or may not be in your best interests to utilize a dedicated server.

For most webmasters just starting out, shared hosting is by far the best and most economic hosting option. Shared hosting basically means that you are sharing server space with other webmasters, at a relatively cheap cost (depending on disk space allotment and bandwidth). But what happens when your website outgrows shared hosting? If your website is hit with large amounts of traffic, congratulations! However, if you don’t have enough bandwidth set aside from your shared hosting provider, your website could go down. Chances are you don’t want that to happen! In addition to the relatively low amounts of disk space and bandwidth attached to most shared hosting accounts, you essentially have no control over your server.

The next step up the hosting ladder would be to use VPS hosting. VPS stands for “virtual private server”. Basically what this means is that you will still be sharing a server with others, however you will have specific resources assigned to you that you have complete control over. In essence, VPS hosting grants you root level access to your server, while simultaneously providing the similar ease of use that comes along with shared hosting. You have your own private server, but you are still sharing physical (and relatively limited) resources. VPS hosting in most cases is more expensive than shared hosting.

So what about those webmasters with high traffic sites that need large amounts of resources as well as complete control of their servers? That’s when it’s time to upgrade to dedicated hosting. While generally more expensive than VPS, dedicated hosting affords webmasters total control over their server by utilizing an entire machine (100% of the CPU, RAM, etc). The capabilities and limitations of your server are contingent upon the machine that is running it. All of the highest traffic, highest ranking sites on the internet are run on dedicated servers, if not on several of them.

If your website is relatively young and still growing, don’t get ahead of yourself and jump to dedicated hosting prematurely, as it can be marginally more expensive. Many hosting providers offer all three types of hosting, and will be happy to upgrade your current server when it is necessary to do so. Some of them will actually alert you beforehand to recommend an upgrade.