It’s always a great feeling when your website finally begins to take off and generate traffic. However, you need to make sure your hosting plan can keep up with that growth. Imagine your website is getting more than a hundred visitors every day. Do you want to keep things that way or increase those numbers? Chances are you’d like the latter. Therefore, you need to make sure you have the right, dedicated hosting plan for your business.
Some of you might consider going for a cheaper option, like shared hosting but is it the optimum solution for your growing website? Shared hosting is a more suitable option for businesses that are still in their initial stages of development. However, if your business is already generating a substantial amount of attention from visitors, shared hosting will not be enough.
What is Dedicated Hosting?
Before jumping on to why you should go for dedicated hosting, let’s quickly understand what it is. As you may already know, there are many different hosting options, and they all have their pros and cons. So what makes dedicated hosting different? In a nutshell, you get to enjoy an entire physical server in dedicated hosting. The server is modified to meet your business needs. You get more storage and memory, resulting in better page loading times.
Dedicated Hosting vs. Other Hosting Options
In contrast to dedicated hosting, shared hosting is a more common and cheaper option. Your website has minimal space on the server in shared hosting as the remaining space is with other websites. All hosts share the memory, which results in slow page loading. On a busy day, other websites may even draw resources from your website as well.
Another option that some businesses tend to go with is a Virtual Private Server (VPS). A VPS server also has shared hosting, but the hosting space remains isolated for each website. This is a much more secure and stable option compared to traditional shared hosting. You can also save money on not renting an entire server. However, compared to dedicated hosting, it doesn’t have the same scalability potential or the level of resources to offer.
Pros and Cons
Like any other technology, dedicated hosting also has its fair share of pros and cons. Getting a solid grasp over these can help you make a smart decision and opt for a suitable plan. Let’s start with the pros:
- It offers better security, stability, and improved website speed.
- It gives you complete authority and control over how you want your server’s configuration settings.
- If there is an attack on a website, it will not affect yours.
- You gain access to plenty of resources giving you the freedom to grow as your business does.
Here are some cons:
- Not cheap compared to other hosting options
- dedicated servers require maintenance for which you need technical knowledge (you can mitigate this by hiring a dedicated hosting team).
By now, you must have a better understanding of dedicated hosting and its pros and cons. However, before you make a final decision, here are a few questions you need to ask yourself to make a better decision.
Size of Your Company
This is a beginner’s guide, so let’s start with some basic questions. Starting, we need to address a common indicator, which is “how big is your company?” Dedicated hosting is well-suited to meet medium-to-large sized organizations’ needs because of their high data storage and transfer requirements.
If you’re an entrepreneur with a small team, dedicated hosting isn’t the right fit for you. You can opt for a reliable hosting plan, but that might be too much for you.
Ever heard of the saying “you can’t have too much of a good thing”? That’s not true in every case, especially with hosting plans. When you purchase bigger plans, you’re only wasting money on space you might not need.
On the other hand, with dedicated hosting, you get your physical server – you can configure it according to your business needs. Dedicated hosting is perfect for users who have particular requirements and want complete control over their server settings. For instance, you have complete freedom to configure your firewall based on your security requirements.
You can always get a managed dedicated plan if you don’t have the time or technical understanding to handle the server. With a few extra dollars spent, you can get rid of the stress of managing and maintaining the entire server.
Securing Sensitive Information
One of the key reasons why most business owners prefer a dedicated hosting plan is data security. Every year, hundreds of websites get hacked in the United States, and one of the main reasons behind this is not having a secure hosting plan. If your company handles the client’s credit card information, you know that’s sensitive information. Therefore, you need an extra layer of security that only dedicated hosting can deliver.
Shared hosting is good, but it’s more like the communism of hosting. You and many other websites share the same space (server), and you have no idea what kind of websites are sharing that space with you. Hence, if a website on the same server as you get attacked, chances are the same attack can reach your website as well.
Data security in hosting plans has always been a primary concern for website owners. With a dedicated server, there will be no collateral damage even if there is a breach on your website. The host can dedicate all his efforts to fixing your website. Doing so takes less time to resolve the issue, and your website will be up and running again.
Do You Have The Right Resources To Manage A Cloud/Shared Plan?
Dedicated hosting plans offer something that no other hosting does, server management. Imagine having a dedicated hosting monitoring your servers constantly, keeping an eye on website performance and security, ensuring everything runs at its best.
Another major perk of having a dedicated hosting plan is your server’s effective management by a dedicated team of specialized tech-heads. These people are trained individuals to manage workloads on your website, unlike other plans where a group of incompetent workers handles your website while handling others as well.
It takes a significant amount of stress off your head when you don’t have to manage the whole server independently. You can save valuable time and money that you can utilize in other business operations.