What is dedicated hosting and why would I need it?

What is a Dedicated Server?

What are dedicated servers you ask? A server is the place where all your online information is stored. If you have a website, it will ‘live’ on a server. If your company hosts an intranet, its home is a server. Having an organisation’s online activities on a server is known as business hosting and, now with the introduction of cloud storage, is usually outsourced to another company.

It is possible to save costs on hosting by sharing a server with other companies. Most small businesses do this. However, sometimes a business would be better off having their own dedicated server. We outline the reasons you may want to have dedicated servers for your business below.

Why Would I Need One?

You need room to grow quickly

Sharing a server is cheaper but it doesn’t leave a lot of space if you suddenly need to grow. Usually, your organisation will be paying for a small part of one server, meaning that many more – sometimes hundreds – of organisations are accessing the same server and storing photos, videos and websites on it. The space can get crowded and if you suddenly have a spike in traffic to your website, the server won’t handle it. Dedicated hosting will give you room to grow, not just in website traffic but also in the number of programmes stored on with your dedicated host.

Specially Designed Apps Need Special Sorts Of Servers

Because shared servers are built to meet the general needs of a lot of different organisations, they usually only work with a specific type of programming, such as PHP. You won’t always want to build programmes or software in these basic languages and when you want to step outside the norm, perhaps with an app built on Ruby of Rails or with a customised content management system, you will need a dedicated server all for yourself.

Faster Loading

Greater bandwidth is one reason large companies move to a dedicated server. Or perhaps you are running more than one business or major project. When more users begin to access documents and portals or visitors to a website begin increasing, the slower pages load and documents download. The ability for a server to push information out to the person requesting it is referred to as bandwidth; you will remember a time when you had ‘slow bandwidth’ – a page took ages to load or you couldn’t get an embedded video to play. Dedicated server hosting increase the bandwidth and ensure everything loads quickly for your users.

Added Security

Security measures such as firewalls – which allow the blocking of certain IP addresses – can be moved to the physical server level when you have dedicated servers. Australia boasts very secure systems, even with shared servers, however ensuring that you can set security measures right at the source of your information is an added level of protection of your most important information.

If you want to find out more about dedicated hosting, contact our friendly hosting experts for a chat.