Articles: Webhosting

A dedicated server hosting provides an exclusive server, or servers, devoted solely to your web site or to your many web sites. You do not share a server with other customers, as with shared hosting. Generally a dedicated server hosting plan refers to the rental and exclusive use of your own hardware housed in the web hosting provider's web farm. A dedicated server hosting plan usually includes a web server, the operating system software and the connection to the Internet.

With dedicated server hosting your server has a stated amount of memory, hard disk space and a previously agreed number of gigabytes of data that can be transferred each month (a.k.a. bandwidth). Having a dedicated server hosting plan offers several advantages as for instance the possibility to host unlimited domains, unlimited e-mail accounts, to install your private resources and any third party software that you need to and last but not least to obtain private security features. Furthermore with today web-based hosting automation software administrating your dedicated server hosting is now extremely easy and efficient.

When do you need to move from shared hosting to dedicated server hosting?

As your online business presence grows or in case your web site is developing a considerable amount of traffic you may find virtual or shared hosting restrictive for your needs. At this stage the best solution is to opt for a dedicated server hosting plan in order to make your site operate more efficiently, in a more secure environment, accessing speedy networks thus obtaining a better performance while keeping your maintenance costs low.

Another reason while you may need to move to a dedicated server hosting solution is due to your particular business where you have to handle secure information through data capture pages or automatically process a large number of transactions such in case of online shopping.

What kind of decisions you need to take when choosing for a dedicated server? Here below a quick checklist once you've determined that the best choice for your web site is to go for a dedicated server hosting plan.

* Level of service (self-managed or completely outsourced)
* Operating system preference (Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc)
* Exact determination of type of hardware, RAM, HD capacity, bandwidth needed, etc.
* Specific applications/software required
* Additional features such as load balancing, firewall, backup systems, etc.