Small Business Web Hosting: What Is Dedicated Hosting?

R.ARTICLE 0.1 — A dedicated hosting service is a specialized type of hosting where a fully managed server is dedicated to the needs of a single user. While this service is designed for large business websites that receive millions of hits every day, small companies can benefit from dedicated hosting as well. With dedicated hosting, you have full access to the entire server.

How Does Dedicated Hosting Work?

This hosting plan is more flexible and secure than shared hosting services. If you purchase this service, you won't have to share server hardware or software. In shred web hosting, there are at least 10 other sites on one server. This may affect your website performance. With dedicated hosting, your site is the only one that is allowed to reside on the server. This means that you are not sharing the system resources such as memory and disk space.

Advantages of Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated web hosting reduces your need to share software or hardware with other websites on a server. By having your own server, you can avoid the pitfalls of shared hosting. In shared hosting, if someone else's website is hacked, your site will be affected as well. Every data configuration error puts your own data at risk. On a dedicated server, this risk is greatly reduced because you control all the data on the server.

The support you get for your server varies from one web host to another. Some companies offer technical support, backups and restoration, application updates, operating system updates, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection, and database administration. Some web hosts may have a minimum number of add on services, while others may provide you with extra features such as control panel, spam monitoring, and ecommerce solutions.

This type of hosting allows the development of more complex applications, including high end email solutions and streaming media. Domain name system, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and email capabilities are typically included. Variations of Unix and Linux are often included at no charge to the customer. Users can select the software and applications that are best suited to the needs of their websites.

One of the main advantages of dedicated hosting is that you don't have to buy or maintain the equipment. If a hardware component fails, your web host is responsible for replacing it at no additional fee. Your dedicated server has its own unique IP address. Additionally, you can run your own custom firewall and install applications that are not allowed on shared servers.