What Is a Dedicated Server and 9 Reasons to Buy One
Many new website owners often choose shared hosting due to its most cost-efficient nature. This is absolutely fine as long as their businesses remain in the nascent stage. But when their sites start to receive a substantial amount of traffic or are anticipated to experience a surge in traffic in the near future, it’s important to upgrade to a better hosting plan.
If the above lines sound familiar to you, perhaps you’ve already started exploring better hosting options available out there. Among all the available options, you’ve most likely come across a dedicated server as a preferred option for medium and large websites.
Now, you might be thinking something like what is a dedicated server? And why do you need a dedicated server? After all, it’s usually the most expensive hosting option available in the market.
In this post, we’re going to answer both of these key questions to help make up your mind. Let’s get started.
What Is a Dedicated Server?
As the name suggests, a dedicated server refers to a type of server that’s fully dedicated to your site and its requirements. Your site gets to utilize all of its available resources without any other site having access to them.
This means when you choose a dedicated server to host your site, it becomes the only user of the storage, CPU, RAM, and other resources available on that server. For businesses or organizations that mainly depend on their web applications or websites, a dedicated server is the best hosting solution.
Since you get to use a dedicated server exclusively, the cost gets significantly higher than most other hosting solutions. But a dedicated server brings you a lot of unparalleled benefits that make it worth the higher price. Buy a low cost dedicated server from elite server now!
Why You Need a Dedicated Server? 9 Reasons
Now that you have knowledge of what is a dedicated server, let’s see the top nine reasons why medium and large businesses alike prefer to buy one.
1. Improved Performance of Your Site
As mentioned above, shared hosting is generally a good option at the initial stage. However, when your site starts to receive a lot of traffic, its performance starts to decrease simply because shared hosting solutions aren’t designed to handle large volumes of traffic.
The more concurrent users and traffic your site receive, the slower it starts to become. Not only does this significantly reduce your site’s performance, but it can also cause your site to crash.
On the contrary, dedicated servers are designed to handle significant volumes of traffic. When you use a dedicated server to host your site, you can rest assured of knowing your site will deliver optimal performance even under sudden traffic spikes.
When your site delivers optimal performance all the time, it leads to reduced bounce rates. And reduced bounce rates result in better user engagement which leads to more leads and in turn, more revenue.
2. Enhanced Security
With an increasing number of cyberattacks, maintaining online security has become a key concern for all website owners. It becomes even more important for sites that deal with sensitive information, such as details of customers’ payment details and their phone numbers. It’s simply a must to safeguard these pieces of information by protecting the site from experiencing malicious activities.
Hosting solutions other than dedicated servers often face security threats in the form of DDoS attacks and other malicious activities. But with a dedicated server, you’re completely in charge of maintaining its security.
Being the only user of the server, you can implement any kind of security measures to make it as secure as possible. Moreover, the chances of getting affected by a security breach from another site on the same server become entirely zero.
Although you’re responsible for maintaining the security of your dedicated server, some hosting service providers offer semi-managed and fully-managed maintenance plans. By choosing one of these plans, you can have the support of a professional team when it comes to taking care of the security aspects.
3. Dedicated IP Address
Every server is assigned a unique IP address by the authorities. So, when you use a dedicated server, it gets a unique IP address, which is used by your site only. However, when you choose a shared hosting solution, your site has to share the IP address of the server with all other sites hosted on that server.
Now, if a site on the shared server contains any adult content or spam, the search engines might penalize it. This may ultimately affect your site severely just because sharing the same IP address. From its SERP rankings going down to getting penalized by the search engines, several things can happen when your site shares an IP address.
On the other hand, as a dedicated server lets your site use a dedicated IP address, the risks of receiving penalties from the search engines or experiencing lower SERP rankings become significantly reduced.
If your site or business largely depends on organic traffic and/or SEO performance to capture leads and generate revenue, it’s almost a must to buy a dedicated server.
4. Improved Page Loading Speed
As a dedicated server provides your site with more resources, your web page elements automatically start to load faster. Not only does this help to improve user experience, but it also brings you several other benefits.
Site speed is among the crucial ranking factors used by the search engines when determining SERP rankings. This simply signifies that if your web pages load quickly, they’ll be more likely to get higher rankings in the search results.
Another major benefit of having better page loading speed is that it helps to improve your conversion rates. As a faster site typically gets a lot more traffic than a slower one, it gets more opportunities to convert your site visitors into leads.
Unlike a shared server, where you don’t have any control over how much bandwidth your site gets to use, a dedicated server can give you as much bandwidth as you need to improve your page loading speed.
*Also Check: VPS Vs Dedicated Server: Which One Should You Buy?
5. Complete Control over Your Site
One key factor that makes dedicated servers highly appealing to business owners and advanced web developers is that they can have complete control over their sites without having to adjust to the needs of other users. With a dedicated server, you get to decide how to utilize it.
For instance, you can opt for your preferred server software. If you wish to use Apache instead of NGINX, you can do so. You can also install your preferred operating system and modify hardware specifications according to your requirements.
6. Easier and Faster Scalability
When you use a shared hosting solution, you’ve to accept the one-size-fits-all structure offered by your hosting provider in the context of server configurations. However, when using a dedicated server, you can conveniently add more applications and services to meet the growing needs of your business.
Even if you opt for a low-cost dedicated server, you can easily scale its performance. You only need to raise a request for a hardware upgrade. For instance, if you need more space, you only need to ask your host to make the necessary upgrades to the server, and it’ll be as soon as possible.
7. Better Reliability
In today’s cut-throat competition in the business landscape, having server reliability is a must for websites to sustain and outperform the competitors. For example, if your e-commerce site is experiencing downtime for any reason, both your potential and existing customers will simply go to one of your competitors.
With a shared hosting solution, you can never expect any assurance of getting minimal downtime. As hundreds of sites are using the same resources, a sudden spike in another site’s traffic can make your site experience downtime.
But with a dedicated server, your site experiences a much better uptime while delivering its best performance. Moreover, many dedicated hosting providers offer an uptime guarantee. This guarantee helps to ensure that you’ll get a refund if the server remains down beyond the pre-specified period of time.
Finally, dedicated server providers generally offer backup and server monitoring facilities together with technical support services to ensure seamless functioning of the server.
8. Zero Purchase or Maintenance Cost
When you decide to choose a dedicated hosting plan, you don’t need to worry about purchasing the server or bearing the cost of maintaining server equipment. You only need to partner with a reputable dedicated hosting provider to enjoy the power of an entire server.
All the costs of building the server and maintaining the equipment will be borne by your hosting provider, letting your experience a better return on investment. However, these advantages come at a cost. But again, it’ll be much cheaper than buying and maintaining a dedicated server yourself.
9. Top-Notch Technical Support
Most dedicated server providers offer a good degree of expert technical support. This is extremely vital as a significant number of dedicated server customers use the servers to run large websites or host mission-critical computing functions.
This kind of support helps to ensure that even if your dedicated server experiences downtime, it comes up within a minimal period of time. For example, if you opt for a fully-managed dedicated hosting package, you’ll most likely get around-the-clock support throughout the year. And you get various options such as phone, emails, live chat, and support tickets to contact the support team.
Final Thoughts
We hope that we’ve been able to provide you with a clear idea of what is a dedicated server and why you need a dedicated server. As signified by the above blocks, a dedicated server comes with a plethora of unique benefits over other hosting solutions.
If your business needs the power of a dedicated server and you’ve got the budget, choosing a dedicated server will certainly be one of the most effective steps you can take to grow your business. As for the cost aspect, the return on investment over time will be much higher than you may probably think.
