Dedicated Server

If you are a professional webmaster or web developer with a professional website and are looking for the best of the best in web hosting then you should consider a dedicated server web hosting plan. But only if you are generating a high amount of traffic and you can justify not going with a much less expensive plan.

We’ll start by outlining why you might need a dedicated server for your web hosting and go into the pros and cons associated with these high-end plans.

Dedicated server hosting is named so due to a single, physical, ‘dedicated’ private server assigned to your account by the web hosting provider. It truly is private as no other account is hosted on your server. They are usually housed in the company’s co-location data centre, where they can be closely monitored, maintained and backed up securely. You will be able to choose generally which operating system (OS) you prefer installed and what default applications. Generally cpanel control panel administration is installed by default.

They are usually pretty beefy servers with high-bandwidth connections (dependent on which plan you are on and how much you want to pay) and can handle high loads of traffic, making these hosting plans ideal for large businesses and professionals. Webmasters and developers have much more freedom on Dedicated servers as they can bypass any control panel admin restrictions and install applications directly on the server, get superuser access, SSH access, modify config files and are not tied down to SOE environments that may be mandated by other hosting services such as Free or Shared.

There is a high price to pay for this freedom, however, with Dedicated plans often being over $100 per month, but you pay for security, performance, privacy and reliability.

Usually Hosting Companies will offer a fully managed service where they will take care of all of the server administration tasks leaving you to just focus on the software side of things, but pf course there are additional costs associated with this. There should also be other less expensive options such as an ‘unmanaged’ service, or part-managed service where only some basic admin tasks will be taken care of by the hosting provider. The kind of tasks the web host provider may administer are operating system upgrades and patching, security updates, antivirus / anti-spyware software configuration and administration, firewall configuration, network load balancing and backups, to name just a few services.

In summary, the pros far outweigh the cons with Dedicated Server Hosting and if you are running a professional, high-traffic site then it is practically mandatory. Avoid Dedicated Server Hosting if you are a beginner or if your venture does not bring in enough income to cover the high service fees and opt for Shared Web Hosting.

Pros:

High availability
Highly reliable (some guarantees of 100% uptime)
Secure
Totally private
Full customization available
Can handle high levels of traffic (for professional sites)

Cons:

Expensive
Not recommended for beginners
Less bandwidth and storage offered compared to Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting