What is Dedicated Server Hosting?
Web hosting comes in as many shapes and sizes as the businesses and properties found online, and so if you’ve got a website and a livelihood riding on it, it’s crucial to pick the best of the bunch. A hosting provider that scales well with your site’s bandwidth and storage needs as traffic increases is the bare minimum for an enterprise site like a popular blog or Ecommerce store. More important is personal support and the knowledge that you have full control over your server hardware, and a support team to answer for the tiniest uptime interruption.
This is where cheap dedicated server hosting comes in, and it means exactly what it sounds like. One can’t simply select the first dedicated solution they come across. It must be a balance of affordable and also value-added, with the full range of perks expected of the best inexpensive dedicated web hosting. For businesses online today, more and more this has meant the following must be considered in potential hosting solutions:
- Do I have full configuration capabilities and root access?
- How well does it scale with my site’s needs?
- How are load times, and uptime?
- Is my server in a private datacenter, with on-site support?
Considering these notions will help a web business sort through various cheap dedicated server solutions without falling for those that don’t fit the bill. Brush up on the basics here and then move onto our reader reviews to get a better feel for which affordable dedicated servers suit your needs best.
Why Do You Need Cheap Dedicated Hosting?
Dedicated server hosting is certainly well named, because it means that the entire server is guaranteed to your websites and web assets, database storage needs, and customer and user traffic. From the outset, you know your server’s specs and capabilities. None of the other clients of your web hosting provider have access to your CPU resources or hard disc (usually SSD) space. In times of heavy user traffic, there’s no butting heads with other websites sharing the same hardware, ensuring a much better experience for people browsing and buying on your website.
Unlike shared hosting plans, dedicated servers allow you and your web admins to make changes to the server settings. Even very cheap dedicated servers should allow root access to configure the hardware and optimize it for your website, or to have a support team on-site for this purpose. This degree of control and ownership is also much more expensive on average. For their money, dedicated web hosting subscribers can anticipate paying three figures monthly as their storage and bandwidth needs require better hardware.
If you have a large monthly visitor count, a popular Ecommerce store, or a site that has lots of large files to support a great customer experience then you know speed and utility are of the essence. With customers more likely to abandon you for a competitor with every millisecond they’re forced to wait, using an alternative to dedicated hosting for your web assets means dollars lost.
Shared and even Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting aren’t as dependable under high-load conditions, because they don’t offer as much bandwidth or the ability to scale to the needs of a growing website as dedicated solutions do. This is simply because they’re not yours, you only have a small and largely undefined slice of community hardware. If you want the ability to cite that your server has an Intel Xeon CPU with 16GB RAM and 10TB bandwidth, devoted exclusively to the needs of your web properties, then you need a dedicated hosting solution and nothing else.
What Are the Benefits of Dedicated Hosting?
- Your enhanced control. Your server means it’s yours, so there’s no harm in changing its configurations or settings, and this is encouraged by most of the best cheap dedicated servers. That means enhanced optimization for your website and better security, because the IT team and web administrators who know your site’s needs best are able to cater to them directly.
- Your sites scale better. There’s no one to crowd the hardware when traffic ramps up in the short or long-term, so your users’ have priority and get the fastest connections possible no matter how many there are. You can choose the soft limits on CPU capacity to leave room for growth and be confident in the knowledge that there are no unknown variables involved.
- A unified experience. Hosting all your sites with one provider ultimately leads to a more consistent experience across them, so customers that are guided from one site to another have a smooth and organic transition. Plus, having all your assets under one roof makes management easier and lets your team focus on value areas.
What Factors to Consider for Dedicated Hosting
- Windows or Linux? Cheap Windows dedicated servers are ideal for websites and businesses which include Microsoft applications in their setup, like Microsoft Exchange, Silverlight, and others. Linux servers are able to run all software except these programs, so be sure to pick a dedicated server with the OS you require.
- Managed or Unmanaged? Cheap managed dedicated servers mean the web host’s team will take care of any changes you need to make to the hardware and conduct regular maintenance on it. That also means you’ll sacrifice the same degree of control you’d get with an unmanaged dedicated plan, so choose accordingly.
- How Good is Support? On-site support is better, and this usually entails the web hosting provider having its own private datacenter. This will be a primary feature of the provider rather than any specific hosting plan and will narrow the list significantly.
- Are Load Times and Uptimes Healthy? Any plan advertising cheap dedicated servers with unlimited bandwidth, storage, and great hardware should be able to back it up with an uptime guarantee. The best can manage 99.9% and give money back when this standard isn’t met. Testing server ping from multiple IPs should also yield good results when aided by CDN caching.
Choose the Best Ecommerce Web Hosting
A thriving web entrepreneur looking for a cheap dedicated game server, for example, has endless options to pick from but a limited number of plans that truly suit his or her business model. For most websites, the best dedicated hosting plans can be boiled down to ideas like the accountability of support, server speed and specifications, and the ability to choose an OS and management model that helps make a new server home.
