If your business or website has grown to a stage where you are receiving a lot of traffic to and from your web portals, then it can quickly happen that speed will become an issue. While traffic and data throughput is still low, shared hosting providers are an ideal situation as they are cheap and easy to set up. But when speed starts becoming an issue you have two choices: (a) buy and maintain your own server equipment or (b) lease a dedicated server host.
Unless you have a dedicated IT department that is set up for and able to maintain high end server systems, you will be better served with hiring a dedicated server. Here are some of the features and advantages that you will benefit from.
No More Sharing
A dedicated server host is dedicated to you and your business by its very definition. You will not be sharing the CPU power, memory or bandwidth with other users and businesses that can ultimately result in quite significant performance problems and even disruptions. The more users a server hosts, the slower it will get and this can and will have negative impacts on your website and customer experience. You will not experience any of these if you choose something like this for a dedicated server host.
Maintenance Services
As already mentioned, one option is to host your own server, but this does require an IT support team that can handle the maintenance and monitoring to make sure that the system is safe, secure and does not break down. With a dedicated server solution you do not need to worry about those things as the service provider takes care of all maintenance and possible downtime. If something breaks down and requires replacing you do not need to worry about getting the parts or the people to fix it.
Hardware Upgrades
Server hardware is constantly improving and even within the space of a year huge changes happen. When you lease a dedicated server, you can constantly review different server configurations and request upgrades as you may need them. The handling of the upgrade is then also not something you have to take care of, but rather the hosting provider, making it a very hand off experience.
Secure Server Locations
It is generally recommended that servers are located in secure premises away from the main business. The type of facility also has to be specialized to handle cooling and ventilation and must be located with a very high bandwidth Internet connection. These are things that most businesses will struggle with to get set up, which is why hiring such services are an ideal solution.
Expandable Configuration
As a company or website grows, more strain will be put on the server hardware. This can be quickly handled by adding more memory and CPU power to handle increased strain and traffic on the system. Such upgrades can be easily requested from the dedicated server host provider, which will then ensure the right parts are installed in a very fast and efficient way that reduces downtime and disruption to your business and customers.