As web services become more integral in people’s lives and the day to the day running of businesses, it is increasingly important that those services don’t fail. With the web being accessed not only from the home pc now, but also from mobile phones, music players, digital readers plus many more devices. The demand on the web services being accessed is also increasing, causing these services to require more and more resources in order to effectively deliver the service they offer.

When is a dedicated server needed?
The are many reasons why you may decide that you need a dedicated server. Security is a big reason. If you are planning on taking credit card payments and storing customers’ credit card details, so that they can reuse the same card for a later purchase for example, then you are required to have a dedicated server. As you can imagine, if you were doing this on a shared server, then there may be individuals also on that server which may try to access that information.
Another reason is that your web site or service may need to have more resources than a regular shared hosting account can offer. VPS hosting would be another option to look at in this case.
Perhaps you want a particular application stack set up on the server and configured exactly as you want it. This may not be possible on a shared hosting account and so once again you would need to look into either a VPS hosting account or a dedicated server.

So if you have a busy website or web service that is experiencing difficulties, what is the best solution for you? This is where dedicated servers come in. Dedicated Servers are seen as the best type of web hosting for people who are running large, popular resource intensive websites and web services, as well as businesses who need to be guaranteed a stable service that is more reliable than other types of web hosting, such as shared hosting and VPS Hosting; this is because a dedicated server is yours and only yours, meaning that you are not sharing it with anyone else and so are not sharing the resources on the server.

However there are drawbacks to dedicated servers. One of the main drawbacks of Dedicated Servers is there cost. The main reason for their high cost, is that a dedicated server is actually a physical machine. Other types of hosting accounts are one of multiples of that type of hosting on a single server or grid. However there is an increasing demand for dedicated servers as the web becomes more and more accepted as a place to do business and so, as a general rule the cost of dedicated servers is falling as they become cheaper to produce and the competition for providing them increases.

Another disadvantage of an unmanaged dedicated server, is that in order to look after and run it successfully, you would need someone with a reasonable amount of knowledge in either linux or windows system administration to manage your dedicated server. However you can opt for a managed server, which would mean one of the server engineers would be alerted if there were any problems and would then work to resolve them. Also on a managed server, any services that you wanted installed on your server would be done by one of the server engineers.

So what are the advantages? As stated previously, one of the main advantages with a dedicated server is that your service is the only one making use of the servers’ resources meaning that your applications would have priority and so be served faster than those based on shared hosting. Also because it is your server and yours alone, you can configure your application stack to run exactly the way that you want it to. If you want to run Java on your server, you can, if you want to run python on your server you can and so on.

There is also the added security that comes naturally when you are the only person running services on the server and accessing the server via ftp etc.. As the owner of the service, you would be able to spot possible flaws in your security. You would also have the added benefit of knowing that no one else is running code or services on the server that may potentially harm or reduce the security of your own service.

There is a lot to take into consideration before deciding to purchase a dedicated server. You need to know the level of resources that your are going to need. As a general rule, it is the processor and RAM that are the most intensely used resources. It is almost always possible to upgrade the RAM, but upgrading a processor may mean changing the physical server that you are on.

If you are thinking of investing in a dedicated server, then why not give us a call on 1890 7000 or drop us an email and one of our server engineers would be happy to talk through your requirements with you and discuss the options that available to suit your needs.