7 Top Benefits of Using Dedicated Server over Shared Server

by Karen C. Health Guide

While there are many different types of hosting plans to choose from these days, including low cost shared web hosting plans, there are still many benefits of choosing a dedicated server solution to a shared hosting plan. If you’re just starting your business or website, or you’re not very technically experienced, then shared web hosting plans might be ideal for you. If you have a large website which requires the maximum performance or a resource intensive application to host, then you will be much better off with Dedicated Hosting. However what many people don’t understand is the biggest benefits of using a dedicated server over shared hosting

In this article we will explain the 7 top benefits of using a dedicated server of shared web hosting.

Reliability

One of the most significant benefits of choosing dedicated hosting over shared hosting is the overall reliability. While it is true that many shared hosting solutions are generally fairly reliable, since your website is being hosted on the same server as many other customer accounts, there’s always a chance that other websites can impact your own website. For example, if one customer’s website experiences a sudden surge of traffic using up more resources on the server, you might find your own website slowing down as a result of this. Similarly, if another website on the server is under attack, you’ll find that your own website may suffer because of this. Having a dedicated server guarantees that all resources are your own, so you won’t be impacted by other websites hosted nearby.

Control

With a the dedicated server you have full control over every aspect of the physical machine, which is in stark contrast to the level of access you have with a typical shared hosting plan. Usually, with shared hosting you won’t have the root privileges needed to have full control of the server - you will only have your own segregated area of the server which you can control. This means that dedicated servers can be customized as you see fit, to adapt to whatever your requirements may be. Shared hosting plans don’t usually provide this level of control so you’ll be more limited in what you can do with it.

Security

As you may have guessed, dedicated servers are typically much more secure than a shared web hosting server. Due to the number of websites hosted on a shared server, there are many more opportunities for security vulnerabilities and potential for malicious activity. With a dedicated server, you will be the only person with access to it, and since you can control how many websites are hosted on the server, you don’t need to worry about someone’s out of date WordPress installation being compromised for example.

Unique IP Address

Each dedicated server is assigned its own unique IP address upon setup, so you have your own online identifier that’s not shared with anyone else - in stark contrast to a typical shared hosting server, which will have many customer websites sharing the same IP Address. This means that the reputation of your IP can’t be affected by any possible spammers on your server, or hacked websites, as the IP is not shared with other customers.

Performance

It should come as no surprise by now that dedicated servers are far superior to shared web hosting servers in terms of performance. Not only are dedicated servers usually equipped with better hardware, you also won’t have to share any server resources amongst other people like you would have to with a shared hosting solution. Your website will be much better equipped to deal with larger volumes of visitors and you’ll be less likely to experience a website crash.

Disk Space

Dedicated servers come equipped with far more disk space than you would have access to in a typical shared hosting plan. Since the one server, hard disk is shared between many different customers on a shared server, you’ll typically only have access to a very small portion of it. With a dedicated server, you have full control over the entire hard disk so you can allocate as much to each website as you wish.

Bandwidth

The final benefit of choosing dedicated hosting over shared hosting that we will explain is the higher level of bandwidth you’ll have. With a shared hosting plan, you’ll often have a cap or limit on the amount of bandwidth that your website can use, meaning there’s a limit on how much data can be transferred back and forth from the website. Dedicated servers usually have a very high limit or unlimited bandwidth so you’ll never experience additional charges or any other problems arising due to a bandwidth limit.