What do you do when you’ve got created a successful website, one that is so successful that your current hosting plan simply is not up to the task and your hosting company is not too pleased with you?
It is a nice predicament to own, but a predicament just the same!
When customers begin finding that they can’t get access to your web site since it’s been taken offline thanks to high resource usage, or that the response time is glacially slow, they usually give up, head to your competitors’ website and buy from them instead.
When that happens it’s time to start exploring dedicated web hosting!
Before you dive straight into dedicated web hosting the first thing you must do is to take a sensible study of your existing web business and do a thorough analysis of both your current needs and your projected future requirements. Obviously, you’ll be anticipating growth over the approaching years, so make certain that you think about the expected increase in demand when working out your requirements.
You may be wondering why you should not simply opt for a bigger and better-shared hosting plan? The problem is that with shared hosting your website is sharing the same hardware resources as numerous other sites, so if those sites are using a ton of system resources then your website is going to suffer. Do you actually want to be in competition with the other sites on your server for precious resources that you need to keep your site running smoothly? Or would you rather have them all to yourself, guaranteeing your customers the best experience and guaranteeing that your web site will stay up and running 24/7?
In fact with dedicated hosting there are more advantages, such as having way more control over the environment that your website runs in, the flexibility to install and run your own software, and not having to stress about what you use your disk space for.
But while a dedicated server may be the perfect solution for any business that is serious about its net presence it is not without its drawbacks. For example, there is the cost issue. Historically a dedicated server has been an expensive choice that only huge companies or successful and profitable businesses could afford. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case, and while there are still a ton of high-priced dedicated hosting packages on offer there is also a lot of companies giving cheap dedicated hosting as well.
Perhaps the most important downside is that of support. A lot of dedicated server packages provide you with the server and leave you to run it as if the server was in your offices. This means that you are responsible for just about every technical aspect of running the server, and if you are not technical then this can be a problem. There are a number of solutions to this problem including recruiting somebody to help you, or, choosing managed server hosting, where the hosting company can handle technical aspects for you, but normally at an increased price.