Dedicated Web Servers - Do You Need Them?

Most people have their web sites hosted on shared servers, whether they know it or not. This means a given web site occupies a space on a server with dozens, or hundreds of other web sites. On a good host, this usually does not cause any problems.

When a site becomes very successful, and has high traffic, shared hosting becomes more of an issue. Though many hosting services offer seemingly generous bandwidth and boast about the speed of their servers, if your scripts grab all the CPU time or your high traffic consistently takes all the bandwidth available then the host will start choking you off, or worse, disabling your site, to protect their other customers.

At this point, a webmaster has to think about dedicated hosting, and choosing between the various dedicated web servers on offer. Some host services advise that you should think about making the switch to dedicated hosting if you have 10,000 visitors a day or more, but even if you don't have this level of traffic yet a virtual server will give your visitors a better and more reliable experience. There are two kinds of dedicated web servers available through the popular hosting services, virtual dedicated hosting, and 'true' dedicated hosting.

Virtual dedicated hosting means you sign up for a 'virtual dedicated web server'. This means that you get root access, a dedicated IP address, and full control of the server space you are renting. It doesn't mean you are the only one using the server. Usually such dedicated web servers are partitioned, so that a user is completely independent of all the others, and the virtual server will deliver consistent high performance. If you have special needs, such as offering file downloads, you can usually get 'overage' protection, so that you will not pay for going over your bandwidth allocation (which would typically start at 500GB a month). Dedicated hosting plans can start as low as $30 a month.

True dedicated hosting is much more expensive, dedicated web servers typically starting at $70 a month or more. Savings can usually be made by signing up for longer periods though. A dedicated server is yours alone, and performance issues caused by other site owners are eliminated. Again, you have a dedicated IP address, root access, the right to install whatever software you want, and so on. Popular uses for dedicated hosting include high traffic commercial sites, gaming servers, large databases and similar intensive usage web sites. You can also run multiple web sites on the one server account.

Most hosting services offer support plans to go along with the dedicated web servers, so that setup, maintenance, security issues and software patches are dealt with for you.

To read more, and to check out some of the top services offering reasonably priced dedicated hosting, see my dedicated web servers page.