If you have a website that is getting too large for a shared hosting plan, or you work for a large company that is planning on launching a web site or getting into ecommerce, you may be looking at getting a managed dedicated server to host your site. There are quite a few elements that go into choosing a managed dedicated server, so this guide to managed dedicated servers will explain to you what a dedicated server is, and what to look for when you sign up with an affordable web hosting company that offers them.
A dedicated server is a simply a server that you as a company or individual lease from a web hosting company. This server will only have your web site files on it, along with the operating system and other features of your choice. Not every web hosting company leases dedicated servers, but you may also have the option with some local web hosting companies of storing your server at their data center and connecting it to their network. This is called colocation hosting.
Dedicated hosting is needed for several reasons. If you plan on having an extremely high-traffic web site, a shared hosting plan and even a virtual private server may not have enough disk space or bandwidth to accommodate the amount of visitors you may be expecting. Also, as long as you are sharing a server with other websites, there is going to be a certain amount of security risk even with virtual private servers that you will have to worry about. If you deal with a lot of highly sensitive data, like credit card numbers or social security numbers, you may be held liable for identity theft if it can be proven that these numbers were stolen from your server. Dedicated hosting provides the most amount of security as far as web hosting goes. A company that needs to install custom software will also opt for a dedicated server. This is because installing custom software may require having root access to the server, which won’t be given on a shared hosting plan. Installing custom software may also require the expertise of an IT tech, which would be available if you sign up with a managed dedicated hosting plan.
Dedicated hosting is also chosen by people for large web sites because of the relatively low start-up cost. For a low monthly fee, you essentially get the server, the hosting platform, the heavy duty connection to the internet, the space to house the server, redundant power, and a certain amount of security. You still retain control of the server, but you don’t have to pay for all of the costs to set up an IT department at your company. For a little more money per month, you can even have fully managed dedicated hosting, which means that even if you don’t know a lot about hosting, you can outsource your web hosting department and use it as needed. This saves from having a full-time employee to manage the web site and the server.
The cost savings doesn’t stop there. Even with unmanaged hosting, the great thing about leasing server equipment instead of owning it is really significant. Besides saving the initial start-up cost of purchasing and setting up the computer equipment, if anything goes wrong with the equipment while you are leasing it, it’s not your problem. If a hardware component fails, the web hosting company has to replace it. If the server goes down, the hosting company has to pay for someone to get it back up again and will probably credit your account for the down time. In other words, you only have to pay for the equipment when it working and you don’t have to pay for any repairs. As well, the lease for a dedicated hosting plan is generally for a year. If your web hosting venture was unprofitable or you decide to shut down operations for any other reason, you walk away from the deal without losing any capital or any other investment other than the leasing fee. This makes a dedicated hosting plan a fairly low investment risk if you aren’t sure about setting up a web site and how profitable it will be.
One mistake that people make when choosing a hosting plan is trying to get a large web site loaded onto the disk space allocated to a shared hosting plan. Even though the advertising may say that a shared hosting plan has unlimited data storage and bandwidth, they mean this in the context that you can put a large personal site or a small ecommerce site on a shared hosting plan. A shared hosting plan will never accommodate an unusual amount of heavy traffic, customized software, or an incredibly large amount of web pages. Shared hosting also does not have much security in the fact that when you share a server with other sites, there are always hackers around that can figure out how to get into your files and steal information including credit card numbers, code, etc. So the main differences between shared hosting and dedicated hosting is the amount of disk space, bandwidth, security, and root access.
Some people even have problems with virtual private server hosting, which is the next step up from shared hosting. VPS hosting offers more disk space, bandwidth, and security than shared hosting, but if you really rely on your site to do heavy amounts of ebusiness, dedicated hosting is still the only way to go.
With dedicated hosting, you are paying enough money per month to make a lot more choices about how your site will be hosted. You not only get to choose the operating system, you get to choose how it is configured. If you need to, you can also install any third party software that you would like to, which many larger companies like telecommunications companies need to do. You can also customize your server settings so that you can deliver multimedia applications faster. One of the really helpful aspects of dedicated servers is that you can partition the storage space, much like shared hosting, to suit your individual needs. The root access is also good to have if you need to try out new applications or codes.
When you are looking at dedicated hosting, you will have to decide whether or not to go with managed dedicated hosting or unmanaged. While unmanaged hosting will set you up initially with the server and also provide some security, you are pretty much on your own after that. So short of failed hardware, you aren’t going to get much in the way of help to fix server glitches or help with third party software if it starts acting up. If you already have a full time IT person on staff, you can assign them to the website, but this is where you have to figure out the pros and cons of managing the website in-house as opposed to totally outsourcing the entire project.
You will have to compare the cost of the salary of your in-house person to the cost of a dedicated plan where you have a tech onsite at the server when you need them. Remember too, that if you have someone in-house to run your dedicated server and they have to leave the company for some reason, you may be out of luck. This is because a hosting company will take responsibility if they handle and install everything from the beginning on a managed dedicated plan. However, they won’t come in and fix someone else’s IT disaster. So this is one thing to add into the cost of getting managed hosting. If that one in-house person that you depended on so much disappears, you will have to pay someone else by the hour to fix anything that goes wrong, and that can get really expensive.
When you are looking for a managed or unmanaged dedicated server, there are certain things you should look for in a quality hosting company. The first thing you should have with your dedicated server is your own account manager. This is the person you can call during normal business hours to answer your questions and also guide you through the initial process of signing up for your account. A hosting company should also have connections with consulting services like web designers and SEO experts. There should be a technical support hotline for dedicated hosting accounts and if you buy a managed plan you should have your own contact in the technical department. You should be able to design your server from scratch including the operating system and the open source software and hardware components that you need for your individual server. A dedicated server should also be scalable, so that as your website grows, the hardware and operating system can handle it.
Your sales person or account rep should be willing to take the time to answer all of your questions. Make sure that you write them all down beforehand and then take several calls to make sure that you have asked everything that you need to know about. Definitely take your time to make up your mind and compare hosting companies. Dedicated hosting companies tend to take more time with the dedicated customer plans than with shared hosting, but there may be a discount web hosting company that you click with more than the others.
