If you’re a business owner in the beginning stages of your website or if you’re a developer working on a large application for your website, a virtual private server (VPS) often works well to get you off the ground.
However, if your goal is growing your business, adding a large amount of dynamic content and so on, there may come a time when a VPS plan won’t be enough you’ll need to move up to a dedicated server.
You’ll know when you need to move on up when you notice your website’s response rate dropping due to inefficient power or bandwidth that your present plan provides. But, it’s in your best interest to make the upgrade even before you start running into issues and troubles.
When your website begins to top the charts, it may go offline if your hosting plan can’t handle the traffic, which is never ideal for any website, especially if it’s your means of income.
Another reason for an upgrade would be in the case of working on a web application that will be moving out of the beta phase. While you’re working on fixing bugs on your application, a VPS will work just fine.
But with the additional use of beta testers and developers in the system, it may be an overkill on your VPS, and even more so when you release your software to the public. This is where you can depend on a dedicated server to handle the inevitable heavy traffic. You don’t want to risk your new project crumbling right from the start. But, regardless of website content, dedicated servers are always the safest and most efficient compared to any shared hosting plan.
Here are some of the popular advantages of dedicated sever hosting.
- Performance & Speed. Network and response times in shared hosting plans depend on the activity of others who you share resources with. With a dedicated server, you will significantly increase response and load times because all systems are utilized and controlled by the application on your own server. This includes your RAM, CPU, network bandwidth and disk space.
- Security. Dedicated servers are more secured because there is only one administrative access to all of your resources. You’re able to configure and personalize all security policies, such as user level permissions and firewall protection.
- Reliability. A dedicated server lets you have unlimited access to server resources, software applications and operating systems.
- Multiple Domains. Dedicated servers offer management friendly and cost effective solutions for multiple domain hosting. It’s a lot easier to to manage accounts as needed from a single interface.
When your expecting to have a very high traffic or a very resource intensive website, or are planning to resell hosting and hosting multiple domains, a dedicated server will no doubt be the best solution. You don’t want to risk website failure due to lack of resources or minimal security, especially when you’ve already put so much investment into the actual website(s) itself.
