Introduction
Wondering how dedicated hosting can boost your business and help you soar above your competitors?
We live in a fast-paced world, where time is precious to most of us and this can be the difference between keeping a visitor on your site and turning them into a repeat buyer or losing their business for good!
One question we are often asked by our clients is “what is dedicating hosting and why it is important?”
Quite simply, if you are serious about your website and attracting as many visitors as you can, then you have a short window of opportunity to capture them once they find your website and this means your site must be quick to open.
The better the performance of your website, the better will be your visitors’ user experience!
Many hosting providers offer very low prices for shared hosting plans, but they will typically come at a cost – poor performance.
Dedicated hosting versus shared hosting:
Shared hosting
With a shared hosting package, there will be many other sites that are hosted on the server along with your website and the server resources are therefore shared among several users, so operating costs are divided up among the users making it a cheaper option over dedicated hosting.
But with other businesses sharing the same resources on a shared server, a lot of traffic can be generated which could drain the server resources such as bandwidth, which could lead to slow response times and slow loading times.
With shared hosting, the amount of disk space and bandwidth you are allotted is limited because there are others sharing the server and most often you will be charged if you surpass you allotted amount or in some cases your website will do down!
Most web hosting companies will advertise their shared hosting plans with “unlimited” bandwidth and disk space. But the fact is that this web hosting plan will always have a limit. In other words, you can’t use the “unlimited” space in one go. You can use an unspecified amount at first, and then add more. But only the web host gets to decide how much you can use each time.
Because a shared hosting plan will always have limited resources, you could never be certain about your site’s performance.
Imagine a situation where you website receives average traffic and another website on the shared server runs a specific campaign and experiences a massive surge in traffic. The shared server will utilise more of its resources to support that user’s traffic, thus affecting your website’s performance.
The result will be that your web pages take a longer time to load and your visitors will get reduced performance and if it was your website that experienced an unprecedented surge in traffic, some shared hosting providers may even penalise you or charge you more for consuming additional bandwidth.
When it comes to security, the basic “mechanism” of shared hosting makes it less secure than a dedicated server.
This is because your website will be on a server which is shared by many other websites and a single invalid script running on the server could cause the server to crash. The biggest issue is that you never know what type of websites are being hosted alongside yours on a shared server.
On a shared server, there is also more of a risk of being ‘blacklisted’ by search engines because someone else on the server engaging in such practices as spamming may get the entire IP address blacklisted.
Dedicated hosting
A dedicated hosting plan means that your website is the only site hosted on the server. With dedicated hosting, bandwidth and disk space are dedicated to you only so there is no sharing and no limitations on the amount of available space.
Having a dedicated web hosting plan means you will never have to worry about another user’s traffic.
The server will be entirely dedicated to your site and you could experience any amount of traffic without having to worry about downtime. So if you have a decent amount of traffic and you want to give a great experience to your visitors, dedicating hosting is the ideal choice for you.
There is more security and reliability of having your website running on a dedicated server. A typical dedicated hosting allows running almost all types of scripts and software. Besides, the web host will always be monitoring your dedicated server to ensure that your site is running smoothly.
It is one of the reasons why dedicated hosting can cost more, but it is a small price given your site is more secure, is not affected by constraints on bandwidth and ‘spikes’ in traffic from your own site or other businesses sites.
Dedicated hosting is perfect for any business requiring the following;
- If your business is continually growing and adding products or services
- Your website features a significant amount of video streaming and high-resolution photos
- Your business handles extremely sensitive transactions, so you require enhanced security features
- You need faster connectivity speeds
- Enhanced security as hackers find it difficult to hack a dedicated server
- The reassurance of fantastic support should a problem ever arise as we get enhanced 24/7 UK support by having a dedicated server
To summarise, for us our clients deserve the best and we don’t believe in taking chances with their websites.
After all you’ve paid good hard-earned money to have a brilliantly designed website, so why would you want the risk of it being slow to load, be affected by other websites on the same server using more resources and have the potential for bandwidths to be exceeded meaning your site goes down?
So for more information on why dedicated hosting can boost your business please contact us.