It’s common for successful online businesses to see their website outgrow their web Hosting, whether it’s shared or VPS hosting. For example, if traffic increases to the site, or you discover a need for resources your hosting account doesn’t offer. A move to Dedicated Server Hosting may be necessary.

What is Dedicated Server Hosting?

Dedicated server hosting means your website is hosted on a web server all its own, shared with no other sites.

Such hosting can be established in-house or through a third-party service and has a lot to offer a growing or established business. Dedicated servers offer many benefits including exclusive use of the server’s resources, a high uptime ratio, less congestion, greater security, and the ability to customize the environment for your site’s unique needs.

When Do You Know It’s Time for Dedicated Server Hosting?

The answer to this question isn’t always obvious. Some consider a move to dedicated server hosting as soon as the website begins to make money.

The only problem with that way of thinking is that such hosting is expensive and funds may be wasted on making a move too soon. However, with the smart use of analytics programs and services, like Google Analytics, can give you crucial data about the site’s traffic and visitors so you have the information to know what your site needs and when.

If you’re unsure of whether or not your business site would benefit from moving to dedicated server hosting, here are some factors to consider.

5 Reasons It May Be Time to Consider Dedicated Server Hosting

1. Performance and Why It Matters

When you have an online business, you want traffic but the type of website greatly affects the impact of traffic on it.

If your business website is a simple static site that doesn’t utilize a database backend, just offering text and graphics, you may be just fine with shared or VPS hosting for some time.

If, however, your site is using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal, more resources are needed as traffic increases and in this scenario, the dedicated resources and options might be ideal.

Performance problems occur when the site doesn’t load quickly, or at all, using its current configuration. If the site takes too long to load or the visitors receive error messages like “too many requests”, check out your analytics.

If you are seeing a solid increase in traffic, it may be a good indication that hosting services with greater resources are needed.

It could also be an indication that, in the case of a shared hosting service where you are sharing a server’s resources with several other sites, that a neighboring site is a culprit. If no discernible increase in traffic is noted, you might consider talking with your hosting company about the issue. You’ll also want to visit the site during your peak times, and analytics will be able to help you identify those, to see what is occurring for your audience.

One last thing on performance, if your site utilizes PHP or CGI coding, make sure it’s debugged and not causing some of the issues. A hosting change won’t improve a situation like that.

2. What Does Security Have to do With It?

In a shared hosting environment, if any of the sites on the shared server are hacked or compromised, all of the sites are vulnerable — including yours. If this a primary concern of yours, you may want to consider the security of dedicated server hosting.

That being said, while there are numerous ways to amp up security to whatever level you need on a dedicated server, the responsibility for it is solely yours. That doesn’t make it impossible as you can set up automatic updates for security patches from vendors. It would also be your responsibility to ensure the code on your site is current as certain scripting languages like ASP, CGI, and PHP can be susceptible to attack.

3. Server Options for Complete Control

There are limitations when using hosting types aside from dedicated server hosting. Maybe you don’t have access to .htaccess to block certain users and to protect select files or folders. Maybe you were hoping for PHP5 but it’s not available at your current host.

If such limits frustrate you or are holding your website back in any way, the ability to fully customize your server environment with dedicated server hosting may be the solution for you. As you would be the only user on the server, you’d be able to set up the environment for the specific needs of the site.

4. Guaranteed Resources

While you’re paying to lease a server with dedicated server hosting, the entire thing is yours. If you need more RAM, you can have it. If you want to increase the CPU speed, you can do that as well. Having such scalable server control ensures your website can grow right along with your business.

Certain conditions, however, may not warrant the investment in dedicated server hosting. If you have a site with high space needs, that may not be enough of a justification to make that move. If traffic is properly managed and you can adjust your current shared or VPS hosting to allow more space, it could be a more economical solution for you to do so.

5. A Dedicated IP Address is a Good Thing

On shared hosting, you’re not only sharing a server but also sharing an IP address. That might not sound like a drawback to you until you realize that if a neighbor sharing your IP address conducts themselves unscrupulously and gets that IP blacklisted, that also has consequences for your site. Once your IP is blacklisted, it can be reversed but the process is lengthy and takes time.

Ready To Make The Move?

Since dedicated server hosting can be costly, it’s important to study website and ascertain its true needs. If moving to dedicated server hosting is needed to keep your site loading fast and it makes financial sense it may be time to take your site to the next level.