What Is Dedicated Web Hosting
By: Eric Fazio

For people, companies or organizations who are looking for the most dependable web hosting solution for their mission critical operations, dedicated hosting will give them what they need. Dedicated hosting isn't the right solution for everyone, and does have some drawbacks, but it has many more advantages than shared web hosting.

When a customer purchases shared web hosting they are on the same web server as hundreds and sometimes thousands of other websites. This can have a negative affect on performance and uptime. When you start using dedicated web hosting your website will be the only website on that server. Dependability is the number one reason people choose to go with a dedicated web hosting solution. Most dedicated hosting packages allow you to have multiple websites on one server, so if you have sister companies, separate divisions, other companies you have relationships with you can share server resources with them, usually with out making major performance sacrifices.

However all of this extra dependability and hardware does come at a higher price. Shared hosting packages run from $2 a month through about $50 a month, with most being less than $20 a month. The most bare bones dedicated hosting packages will start at $80 a month and range as high as several thousand a month. Most people find they fall in the $200 to $500 month range for dedicated hosting solutions. When looking at hosting packages there are two major areas you should be concerned with managed or unmanaged servers and hardware configurations. With an unmanaged server the customer is responsible for software, security and other maintenance that the server needs. Selecting an unmanaged server can often save you quite a bit of money over the year. However unless you or someone on your staff is experienced with maintaining a server this is usually not a good idea, and will cost you and money down the line. The next thing you have to consider is hardware for the machine, what size disks will you need, how fast does your processor have to be, how much bandwidth do you need and so on. When making these decisions plan for where you are today and where you plan to be in 18 to 24 months from now. You want to make sure you allow for future growth, but you don't want to overpay for resources you are never going to use.