Pros and Cons of a Dedicated Server for Your Small Business

Dedicated web hosting can be a great choice for small businesses. It can help them establish an optimal workload and provide full control over the hosting setup. Dedicated web hosting is the highest-quality hosting available on the market, with notable advantages over other kinds of hosting in terms of security, reliability, scalability, and performance. For this reason, it has the highest price tag out of all web hosting solutions.

This article presents the pluses and minuses of this type of hosting. It will explain why it can be a viable option for companies with high hosting requirements. Dedicated hosting can help your company grow and prosper, but with some investment on your part.

Fast loading

Dedicated hosting makes more resources available compared to other types, and elements load more quickly as a result. The software available with shared hosting is far slower, even if the data is the same.

Google uses speed to determine websites’ search rankings. Speed is inversely proportional to rankings: the less time it takes a site to load, the higher the rankings. A dedicated server provides one of the most effective ways for a website to perform at an optimal speed.

Speed is key to conversion rates, having a direct effect on the bottom line. To this end, here are several statistics:

· 40% of potential customers leave a website that takes three or more seconds to load.
· Slowing down loading time by even a second leads to 7% fewer conversions.
· Almost 50% of people who abandon a shopping cart cite low speed as the reason.
· More than 10% of visitors leave pages that have a one-second delay in response time.

Improving your website speed will also make it possible to add custom features like streaming and animation to your website without it taking too much time to load.

The benefits of dedicated resources

Websites that choose dedicated hosting achieve high speed because they don’t share resources with other platforms, users, and apps. If you opt for this type of hosting, your business website will have exclusive use of disk space, RAM, CPU usage, bandwidth, and other server resources. You also won’t face any of the significant risks and potential problems with shared hosting because you have the whole server to yourself. Some of these risks and problems include the following:

· Low loading speed during peak usage or traffic hours.
· Network congestion.
· Occasional crashes.
· Another user running a bad script.
· Another user is eating up your resources.
· Frequent downtime.

With dedicated hosting, you don’t compete for resources, which ensures your website will be stable. This is a crucial element because it guarantees consistent performance, which helps improve user experience and creates a good business reputation.

Top-notch Security

Businesses with significant security demands choose dedicated hosting because it does away with many risks of other types of hosting, such as:

· Downtime or data loss due to a DDoS attack.
· Accidental activity of another user that impacts your site.
· Getting hit by malware or a virus from another user of the server.
· A malicious entity infiltrates the device and accesses your data.

Providers of dedicated hosting also take security measures like top-tier protection against cybersecurity attacks and real-time server monitoring.

With dedicated hosting, you can rely on solid physical protection as the server is all yours. Your website and devices benefit from the following:

· Locks with biometric scans.
· Armed guards.
· Round-the-clock video surveillance.
· Motion detection.
· Mantraps.

Dedicated servers are the best choice for businesses that have to meet HIPAA and PCI requirements because the security is customizable.

Managed maintenance, updates, and device setup

The majority of dedicated hosting services can handle software updates, general maintenance, device setup and configuration (switches, servers, firewalls, hardware updates, etc.), server monitoring (fault management, app health, server metrics), and recovery and backup.

Managed hosting is a great option for a business that:

· Does not have (or can’t afford) IT staff.
· Performs mission-critical operations with little to no tolerance for downtime.
· Is located far from the hosting data center.

The Cons of Dedicated Hosting

Now that you know about the benefits of dedicated hosting, here are some downsides that this hosting type can have.

Dedicated Hosting is Expensive

If your business and website are relatively small, a reliable hosting plan will cost you between $1,000 and $3,000. You can rent a server, including management, for about $100 per month. If you choose to buy a server, you’ll have to hire an admin, either full-time or part-time. It’s best to have someone check your server once or twice a month. Another con is that dedicated servers take up space.

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