An Internet connection is all that is needed to access millions of websites around the web. This is possible because these sites are hosted on computers that constantly run so they remain online 24 hours a day and 7 days of week. Of course, the average computer cannot do that unless it is running an extremely fast connection and remains turned on. Therefore, anyone that wants to set up their own website needs a web hosting provider.
Web hosting providers offer paid plans that keep your website up and running far better than the free ones provided. If you notice, most sites love to offer the cheapest plan because those plans are great for starters. But if you decide and check out the other packages available, you might see some dedicated web hosting plans.
A dedicated web hosting plan has nearly the same specifications as the shared plan, but the site is stored in its own dedicated server. A dedicated server should be your choice if the following are all true.
You want your website to be as safe as possible
Protecting your website calls for using strong passwords to protect your database and using the latest, most secure versions of applications on your site. However, you could use all of the best protective measures and still suffer from the effects of attacks against another website on the same server as your own if you use a shared hosting plan. With a dedicated server, your site is the only one on the server; so if your site is safe, it’s going to be well protected.
You Want The Highest Performance For Your Site’s Visitors
When traffic accumulates in a single website, the performance isn’t affected all that much if the server specifications are high. But once you have lots of websites stored in that server and all the websites get large amounts of traffic, all visitors will suffer from slower speeds. This may not be very noticeable for simple page loading, but if your site has lots of multimedia content, slowdowns can occur and may frustrate your visitors. With a dedicated server, all of the servers resources are for your website ensuring maximum performance even during heavy traffic periods.
You Need Total Control Over Your Web Server
Even shared web hosting lets you control what you upload to your site, the applications you use and the privileges for these applications and content. There is more to web hosting than this though; if you need to change VPS settings and set root privileges to allow several different people to manage your site, then you’ll want to use a dedicated server. Especially if your website is for business, then you’ll have an easier time running your website using a dedicated server.
If not all of these three conditions hold true for your website, then you can probably keep using shared hosting for the time being. Shared hosting is great for your site when it’s just getting started but as your site and your online business presence grow, you’ll need the control, the performance and the security which a dedicated server provides.