What Is Dedicated Web Hosting?Do you really need it ?

When you first decide to build your website, one of the very first things you start pondering are what type of hosting account you will need. And the options are endless – you can host it on a local machine, which is really a choice for very few people. You can order shared hosting if your needs for bandwidth for example aren’t so high. Or you can go with the dedicated hosting option, or even a cloud hosting option. Learning which one is best can be troublesome for some people , so we’ll try to clarify the issue below.

So what is dedicated hosting exactly ? Dedicated software is basically having an entire server machine rented only to yourself and your needs. If you were to go with the shared hosting plan (which is the most popular option) many features would be limited to you, since you order only a fraction of the computation power and storage on the server, the rest is distributed to other accounts, for other users like you.

The Benefits of Dedicated hosting :

The fact that you have an entire server to yourself will bring lots of benefits to the way your system functions, especially if you’re the kind of person who needs more processing power for their site’s needs, as well as a fast response.

Flexibility is obviously a huge benefit in dedicated hosting. The choice of hardware, an operating system and various other add-ons for your server machine is entirely up to you. You can build your server around your programming solution and not the other way around ,as you would have to do with shared hosting accounts.

Better control is obviously something which also needs to be noted, as you can have root access to your own server, something nearly impossible for any shared server. This way you’ll be able to control your system from the deepest levels of access, being the true administrator.

Speed is another factor present mostly in dedicated hosting – you’ll have all the resources of the system to yourself. No sudden dropdowns in performance due to other people’s faulty coding. This system is entirely for yourself.

Improved stability and security comes with the fact that no one else is going to prod any settings on your machine, not even your provider because they try to intervene as little as possible.

Also, most dedicated hosts come with a better connection than other plans, but that’s not because of the dedicated host itself, but rather because of the frequent practice to do that in the web hosting companies.

The Drawbacks of dedicated web server :

Though not drawbacks strictly speaking, the items in this part of the article will explain some characteristics of dedicated hosting that make it not viable in certain situations. Think of these not as inherent flaws, but rather reasons not to have dedicated hosting if you don’t really need it :

1. Higher cost. This should be fairly obvious to most – if you’re not planning on returning the investment from your website, you have low traffic to it, or you just want to run some personal website, you should basically go with a shared package, because it will do all you need, and won’t cost as much as a dedicated plan. Not utilizing your dedicated hosting is overkill, simply put.
2. More complicated. Nowadays, shared hosting packages come with features like a control panel, ready to use scripts for your website, out-of-the –box apps for administration and an easy interface. If you don’t have the time to explore the professional, more complicated side of hosting, you’ll need to hire a specialist to do that, and that might be quite cost-worthy for a small business, and may make you reconsider getting a dedicated hosting account.
3. Legal issues. The fact that you have your own machine means you’re entirely responsible for what you run on it, since there are no limitations. You might be charged with running DoS attacks, something which can simply not work on a shared hosting account. However, this is only a very small side of the issue.

In general, we can summarize that a dedicated hosting account is a better solution, as it provides you more freedom and more system resources. But it’s really a good decision only if you’re running a very popular and high-demanding site that will need those resources. Otherwise you can stick to the other, cheaper solutions which will still do the trick.