Any website getting over 10,000 hits a day may be ready for a dedicated server. Though shared plans can be effective for smaller websites, their disadvantages start to reveal themselves once traffic picks up. While you’re saving money, you’re also sharing precious bandwidth. This translates to slowdowns, failures, and a host of other problems your visitors will experience when trying to use your site. The benefits of moving to a dedicated server are numerous.
Reliability
One of the biggest advantages to moving to a dedicated server is the increased reliability it affords. At last, you’ll be left to worry only about the traffic coming to your website. You can forget about what the other websites on your plan may be doing to slow response times to a crawl. A thousand factors can affect the speed of your website. Browser compatibility, ads, and poorly optimised images are among them, but these things are within your control. On a shared server, you don’t have control over sever-wide traffic, which can slow your website to a crawl. A dedicated server such as a quad-core Dell PowerEdge and a good plan from a company like Digital Pacific can turn reliability into one of your website’s strengths.
Customisation
If you like to play around with the capabilities of your website, you’ve probably run into restrictions a time or two. Shared plans impose these restrictions because they can eat away at bandwidth that needs to be spread around. Switch to a dedicated server and you’ll see a world of difference when it comes to customisation options. Introduce better feeds, implement new software, and take your website management to the next level. A dedicated server also gives you the flexibility of choosing an operating system that best suits your needs – choose from a range of Windows and Linux server operating systems.
Privacy
Any good web hosting company will fill their service contract with assurances when it comes to your privacy. While many companies do an excellent job of keeping your data secure, no software protection can compete with physically segregating your information. This is what you get with dedicated servers and it can go a long way towards increasing your security.
Upgrading: When Is It Time?
Three major factors will help you determine when it’s time to upgrade from a shared server plan to a dedicated one. The first of these is traffic. If you’re bringing in 200,000 or more hits per day, it may be time to consider moving to a dedicated server. The improvement in your website will be noticeable immediately. Performance is the second factor you’ll need to consider. A slowdown in performance isn’t always caused by a shared server plan, of course. Buggy coding, too many ads, and a plethora of other issues can be to blame. It’s important to rule out alternative problems before addressing your server needs, but once you’ve done that, a dedicated server may be the best solution. Here are some performance problems often solved by making the switch:
- Slow page loading
- Errors coming back on database requests
- Pages timing out due to server overload
Even taking performance and traffic out of the equation, however, many people make the switch purely for the increased customisation it affords. With a dedicated server, you can easily make changes at your discretion, giving you a website that is—for the first time—truly yours.
To find out more about the dedicated server hosting solutions offered by Digital Pacific visit our website or give our friendly sales team a call on 1300 MY HOST. Or if you’re looking for dedicated servers in the US, check out Colocrossing.
