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Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2009 Time: 11:44 PM
Many webmasters as well as small businesses initially start out with a small website with about 20 to 30 pages which is hosted on a shared web hosting server. However, as their web hosting requirements increase with the passage of time due to either an increase in the number of visitors or a need for higher functionality, they may start considering other hosting options. One possibility in stepping up to a better web hosting plan may be to sign up for a VPS hosting service. This may be fine for some time but as the website continues to grow in size reaching a few hundred pages, it may expect to receive millions of hits in a month depending on how aggressive the marketing strategy is. This is probably the time when the growth of the online business has reached such a level that it needs a better web hosting option such as a dedicated web hosting server. The purpose of this article is to outline in detail what you may expect from a dedicated hosting server and how it can meet the expanding possibilities of your online business.
On a shared web hosting account, your website may have been functioning alright for a limited period of time. What might have been most annoying to you at times could have been the total amount of downtime that your site had seen since it was hosted on a shared web hosting server. There might also be other occasions when your previous close friend or confidant may have gotten access to your website's login and password and deleted your website from the server within a matter of minutes. However, given the amount of time that you have now spent on your website and the money that you have invested into it, you can't afford to have such a situation again. Consequently, you must start considering some alternative web hosting options such as a dedicated server hosting package which can give your website the kind of reliability, functionality, ruggedness and top-notch performance that only big businesses dream of.
In contrast to a shared web hosting server which simply divides the storage space virtually into a number of partitions each of which is assigned to a different customer, a dedicated web hosting server is a stand-alone piece of equipment that can be rented from a hosting company. This gives you the peace of mind that your system's resources are not meant to be shared with anyone else, be it the computer's microprocessor, the hard disk drives, or the random access memory. Furthermore, any programs or applications that are installed on the server can exclusively be chosen by you as per your specific requirements. Apart from this, in case you have given access to other users to the software that is installed on the machine, they can also use those applications simultaneously with you. However, the above-mentioned benefits may not be sufficient in order to entice you to commit to a dedicated web hosting server which certainly is a much more expensive option than a shared hosting server. What follows will therefore outline the more specific benefits of purchasing a dedicated hosting server.
A dedicated hosting server is particularly suited to any site that receives plenty of traffic. This is due to the fact that there usually is no upper limit on the total amount of data transfer for the website that resides on a dedicated server. Apart from the ability to install almost any kind of software on the machine, what adds the greatest value to such a plan is the level of achievable customization. A great majority of companies offering dedicated web hosting give you the option to fully customize the server according to your needs. Since a number of features are available to the end-user to choose from, so you can purchase any specific features that are most important to you. These may include choosing the right type of operating system which may prove to be the ideal platform for your Web applications. Two major operating systems such as Windows and Linux Red Hat are usually offered by the majority of dedicated hosting providers. As far as the choice of the control panel is concerned, the two most popular brands offered by companies include CPanel and Plesk. Although CPanel is the more widely used one, Plesk is also popular for a number of reasons and functions that are not present in CPanel.
The second most advocated reason in favor of a dedicated hosting server is the unmatched level of reliability that it can offer. Since your site will be the only site residing on the dedicated server, the responsiveness of your applications will be maximum because you're the sole user of the server. Secondly, the total bandwidth that your site is receiving will remain unaffected since there is no other site requesting any bandwidth from the server. The result is that your high-traffic website will run at lightning fast speed and the requests coming from the browsers of your visitors will be fulfilled in literally no time. Another big advantage of a dedicated hosting server is that you can avoid any security risks which may adversely affect your website if it is hosted on a shared server. For example, if there is a user who is maliciously trying to install an application that is infected with a new type of virus which the antivirus software is unable to detect, your account may also get infected with the result that you may lose all of your important data. In order to counteract this, many dedicated servers come installed with an external firewall which can tighten your security defenses along with giving you the option of changing any access rights you may want. Consequently with a dedicated server, you can enjoy a worry less sound sleep in the night that no one can have access to your server at any cost.
Another big advantage of a dedicated server hosting package is that your website is assigned a unique IP address which can identify it as soon as a visitor tries to access the site's URL. This is usually in contrast to a shared web hosting account which assigns a single IP address to all the sites hosted on its partitions, with the exception of a few shared hosting packages that are generally more expensive. The disadvantage of a single IP address is that the site's URL address cannot be recognized immediately, instead there is a separate piece of software hosted on the shared server which directs the URL request to the correct partition holding the website. Although this operation is typically quite fast, it has the potential to be slowed down owing to a large number of sites hosted on the shared server all of which have simultaneous incoming requests. The dedicated web hosting server eliminates the need of any specific software with the result that the visitor is connected to the site immediately.
There might also be a host of other options included with a dedicated server plan thereby further increasing its benefits and advantages. You always have the option to install multiple hard drives on the same dedicated server in order to protect any crucial data your web application might be generating such as your customer's credit card information. The advantage of having more than one hard disk on the server is that the first one can be used as a primary storage medium while the second one can be used as a backup medium. This redundancy can result in a significant protection for your valuable data and can only come with a dedicated server package. Furthermore, the dedicated hosting provider may also give you the option of having a backup FTP account, the advantage of which is that you can replicate essential content on it in parallel with the usage of your regular FTP account.
Having outlined all the benefits and advantages of a dedicated hosting server, it is now up to you the potential buyer to carefully select a dedicated hosting company that can fulfill all of your requirements without being too heavy on your pocket. This may not be as difficult as it sounds once you have familiarized yourself with all the important information presented in this article. There are plenty of options for choosing a dedicated hosting company and strictly speaking, there is no definite line of action that may be adopted in order to pinpoint the right one. However, irrespective of which dedicated company you ultimately decide to go with, the above-mentioned important advantages and benefits must be looked for in a company before making the final decision.
About the Article
This is a genuine article custom written for WHL (WebHostLead.com). WHL is an unbiased dedicated web hosting server reviews directory providing information about the best dedicated hosting providers. It is based on webmaster reviews about the top web hosting companies.
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