Do you need a dedicated server ?

If you are looking to set up your online business and are considering purchasing web hosting services, you may come to a point in which you have to decide between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting.

But before you make a decision, you need to be sure about the convenience of one web hosting service over the other, because making the right choice now will avoid future problems and additional costs for your company.

Basically, you need to think about what your online business will need in order to run properly, but also about not spending too much money on services that you may never use.

The main advantage of renting a dedicated server is that your website will be able to deal with a huge amount of traffic. This makes this the right choice for businesses that consist on keeping users coming back and interacting with your site very frequently. For instance, if you are offering services such as free web mail, blog hosting or picture gallery hosting, this is the choice for you. Shared servers have bandwidth limitations, and this means that when a certain bandwidth is exceeded your site will be made unavailable to users until the next period, typically the end of the month.

Dedicated servers also have the space advantage: since they are assembled according to your specifications, you can have as many hard disks as you need installed. If you are setting up a web hosting company yourself, want to assign a certain disk space quota to each of your employees, or get full control on the configuration of your clients’ websites, then you definitely need a dedicated server.

Another feature of a dedicated server is that you have full control of what software is or is not installed in it. So if your online business depends on a certain characteristic of your site that is exclusive, there is a high chance that a shared hosting service will not support it. For instance, if you need to perform certain tasks like converting documents to PDF on the fly, or sending faxes or sms text messages then you will probably need a dedicated server, because web hosting providers will not install the components you may need to preserve resources (like memory and processor power) that other websites hosted in the same server may need to perform their own tasks.

Another good situation in which you will definitely need a dedicated server is when you need to periodically try new components or services that require the server to be shut down momentarily. Shared servers do not allow this because it would result in service interruption and downtime for other web sites hosted in the same computer as yours.

As you can see, dedicated servers have a lot of advantages over shared servers, but they also cost much more. The only one that can decide which web hosting option will best fulfill your needs, satisfy your customers and suit your business best is yourself.

Stefan Holm
Dedicated Server Advisor Team