Dedicated Servers explained

[WebHost Admin]

Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicated server webhosting is where you lease an entire webserver for your webhosting needs.

This is a more advanced solution than either Shared or Reseller hosting, and often requires a significant degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated servers generally have much higher resources available, and do not simply offer more in the way of diskpace or bandwidth, but also offer full processor resources.

It also tends to be a much more expensive webhosting solution, and costs really need to be justified according to your actual resource and security needs.


What to expect with a Dedicated Server
You can expect to have some degree of support for a deciated server, usually in the form of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which will almost always focus on hardware replacements and compensation for extended downtime.

However, the actual management of the Operating System (OS) used, and the software applications running with it, are the responsibility of the customer purchasing dedicated hosting services.

While some hosting ISP’s may provide some degree of support on OS and software issues, generally you should never expect a server vendor to provide this, and you should certainly never expect to run a dedicated server without any form of managed plan without having the technical skills to handle it.

One of the core roblems of running a dedicated server are that you are required to be able to administrate a certain degree of technical competence, and this can come from either yourself, your employees, or else from hiring out management services direct through the datacenter or via a third-party.

If you can handle the technical challenges of smoothly operating a deciated server, then the reward is an entire server machine for your own use.

Not only does this mean that the entire range of resources for that server are exclusively yours to use, but it also means that there are far less security concerns than Shared or Reseller hosting, because because there is no one else sharing your server.

The amount of resrouces available depend on many things, from hardware configurations, to bandwidth allocations by a hosting company. Generally, the overall resources available will be much more generous than simpler forms of hosting.

The server resources can be used to provide hosting for a single website, multiple websites, or even form part of a wider server network, such as clustering for load balancing of extremely demanding websites, or else to assign specialist roles in a network, such as e-mail server, SQL server, etc.

Dedicated servers are a high end solution to web hosting issues, and are often preferred by companies wishing to protect busy branded websites.


Advantages/Disadvantages of Dedicated Server Hosting

Pros

• Extensive resources available.
• Flexible solutions for managing multiple websites or demanding single websites, or even as a speciality server
• Fewer security concerns than other hosting packages, due to lack of unknown users on the same machine
• Better utilisation of resources, as your site(s) alone will be using them

Cons

• Usually much more expensive than any other form of hosting, though prices can vary markedly between vendors, and especially between the US and UK markets, with the US being generally cheaper.
• Technical challenges can be extensive - you should never attempt dedicated hosting by itself, unless you are clearly familiar to some degree with not just the Operating System you are trying to use for your server, but also issues of managing security, backups, and software applications running on the server
• Greater responsibility on the suer to manage security and software concerns

Overall

Dedicated hosting offers a high end approach to hosting - but it comes at a price.

If you have the expertise, money, and overall need to use extensive server resources, then dedicated hosting can provide a very powerful solution.

However, most webmaster and business websites will never individually require the level of resources required, while those which do should definitely ensure they arrange the required technical expertise to properly manage such resources.

[aquariancore]

The article gave me what I was looking for as my web host pushes the dedicated plan, I don't have the expertise.

[webhosting.uk.com]

Nice post.

Thanks for sharing it with us.