Dedicated Hosting : Should You Opt For Dedicated Web Hosting?
Jul 4th, 2008 by Ray Lam
Dedicated hosting enables businesses and individuals to get a pre-configured connectivity as well as advanced equipment from a website hosting company. Dedicated hosting gives the website owner many advantages stemming from the fact that an entire server is dedicated to the website. While the website owner is only concerned with web software issues, the hosting company on the other hand owns, maintains as well as backs up the server apart from looking into the security, power supervision plus other aspects of data center maintenance.
Ownership of a dedicated server can b compared to owning a piece of property. You can put around a little fence and decide how much furniture and equipment you need.
You can expect your service to be much more reliable due to the fact that with dedicated server you do not share space with others. With shared hosting you may share space with 10 or even 100 other users. Not only do you share the hosting space but data transfer as well. If your average use of data transfer becomes more that 10% of allowed monthly transfer, you may be politely asked to close your account. While with dedicated hosting you are allowed to increase your data transfer if needed.
Aside from flexibility and control, there are other advantages of having dedicated web hosting. Because you are the only customer using the server, you don’t share resources such as hard drive space, processing speed, bandwidth and applications, so dedicated web hosting can be a lot more efficient and can provide a lot more space and speed of processing for your website, database and email applications. The disadvantage of dedicated web hosting as compared to virtual web hosting is that the cost of dedicated web hosting is higher than that of shared hosting.
Domain name servers (DNS) provide the link between your domain name (mysite.com) and its Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP address is a series of numbers like this: 123.456.78.9. and every web server has its own IP address. For a dedicated server hosting a single domain, the IP address is equivalent to the domain name. A site hosted on a dedicated server can be found on the Web as either 123.456.78.9 or as mysite.com.
Conversely, a server providing shared web hosting contains multiple websites on the same computer but they all have the same IP address. If you were to type in an IP address associated with a shared server, you’d get an error message or possibly would be redirected to the hosting company’s main web site. So domain names are mandatory for websites hosted on shared servers as they are the only way to access those web sites - they cannot be accessed by an IP address alone as they can be with dedicated web hosting.