Dedicated Server Hosting: The Features And Benefits Of Using Dedicated Servers

You?ve come a long way from your fledgling website that only got two hundred hits per month. You now have a three hundred page monster on its way to getting millions of hits per month. You?re going to need a better hosting plan than you had before. A much better hosting plan.

Sure, your shared hosting plan worked fine in the past. Ok, well, not counting those intermittent down-times and oh yeh, that other time when someone (one of your competitors, maybe, but most likely an ex-girlfriend) figured out your account password and deleted your entire website. But that simply will not do for your website as it is now. You?ve invested too much time and money into this project and its finally starting to yield some results. There is absolutely no question about it: you need to find and review dedicated server plans and choose the right one fast!

A dedicated server is itself, the physical piece of hardware that your hosting provider rents to you. It has its own processor, hard drives(s), Random Access Memory (RAM) and bandwidth capability. Your website and its associated software will be hosted exclusively on this dedicated server?s hard drives. Dedicated servers allow you to install and run almost any program. They additionally allow other users, whom you have given access, the ability to connect to your dedicated hosting server and use those same programs at the same time you do. This has made dedicated servers very popular amongst internet gamers. Dedicated gaming servers offer all the same features of regular dedicated hosting servers but they are intended for less serious pursuits.

But what are the other benefits of utilizing dedicated servers? That?s certainly a valid question considering that dedicated server hosting costs significantly more than shared or virtual hosting plans. But with the increased cost comes features and benefits that are significantly worth it.

There are many benefits of using dedicated server hosting for your high traffic, software intensive website or gaming application. We?ve listed the most important below to steer you in the right direction.

Customization: Most dedicated server hosting plans allow you to fully customize or build your own dedicated server. You can therefore select and pay for only the features which you will require. You often will get your choice of operating system software (Windows Server Edition & Linux Redhat being the most popular options). Your choice of such software should be informed by considering which system your web applications will run best on. A major selling point with dedicated hosting plans is also which control panel to use. Plesk and Cpanel control panels are the most popular choices. Both will allow the hosting of multiple domains and websites but Plesk control panels have proven more popular largely because of their ease of use and their ability to facilitate event management, Postgre SQL, Support Ticketing Systems, various Language Packs and advanced dedicated game server hosting.

Reliability: Because your website or application is hosted exclusively on this dedicated server, you don?t run the risk of the server being congested by requests for other people?s websites or applications. On a shared hosting plan, the speed at which your web application loads is dependent upon how much traffic other websites that are on the same shared hosting server are getting. This causes slow loading times for high traffic websites and other websites that share a server with them. Dedicated server hosting avoids all this by affording your web application exclusive bandwidth. Shared hosting is also risky because you have no idea who is uploading what to the same server that you are hosted on. John in Nantucket might be uploading a web application containing an as yet unidentified virus that deletes everything it touches. If your website resides on the same server as John?s, then, to put it technically, you?re screwed. Dedicated hosting avoids all this and lets you sleep a little easier at night.

Security: No one else has access to your server but you. You are responsible for all its contents so there is no possibility of viruses or other malicious software unless you put them there. Additionally, most dedicated server plans come with the option of an external firewall so you can better enforce your specified access rights.

Unique IP Address: All dedicated servers have their own unique IP address so the IP address of your domain points only to your website. Shared hosting plans assign 1 IP address to every domain and website hosted on that particular server. Website traffic is then directed by host-header-reading software installed on the server. This process is usually very quick but can be slowed down on a congested shared server. Your dedicated server will have its own unique IP address which can only point to your website or web application. No header-reading software is needed to slow down the loading process (unless you decide to host multiple websites).

Upgrades, Upgrades!: No doubt, your website will continue to grow and so will your budget. At anytime during your dedicated server hosting you can add more bandwidth, RAM and increase your processor speed. While some hosting providers will allow you to switch operating systems this is generally not recommended. Make your mind up in the beginning and stick to one OS. This will save you many hours of tedious software conversions and ?unexplained? downtimes.

Other Options:

o Hard Drive Arrangement: If you have opted to have two hard drives on your dedicated server then you can arrange them in one of two ways: Raid 1 or Raid 2. Raid 1 or disk mirroring, allows you to select one hard drive as your primary ?work from? hard drive while the other hard drive serves as an exact copy of the primary drive. This is very important if your web application will contain highly sensitive data relating to your customers or any other unique information. If you are not particularly concerned with this kind of back-up utility you may opt for a Raid 2 configuration in which there is a primary hard drive with the secondary drive being used once the primary storage becomes full. The Raid hard drive arrangements make dedicated server hosting many times more reliable than regular non dedicated server hosting.

o FTP Backup: The best dedicated hosting providers will additionally provide an FTP back-up account for your account. You can mirror vital content that is already on your dedicated hosting server in that account.

The benefits of dedicated server hosting are clear. Armed with this knowledge feel free to look around for the cheapest dedicated hosting providers. A reliable dedicated hosting company will provide you with all the above-mentioned options to ensure that your mega website and games are always up and running. Remember, choose only those options which you need in a reliable dedicated server. There is no hard and fast rule for what constitutes reliable dedicated servers : you must carefully decide which options are best suited for the applications which you intend to run. A low cost dedicated server that has all the bandwidth, space and security features to run your programs effectively is the perfect upgrade from a non dedicated server hosting plan. Your dedicated hosting server is yours to customize so do it wisely and cost effectively.

Brandt Fuller is the CEO of http://www.CHLD.net Chippy Hippie's Live Domains. They are web hosting experts and provide some of the cheapest domain name registration on the entire web. They have years of experience in the domain name and dedicated server hosting industries and give great 24/7 customer support with all their services.

A Change in Paradigm: Dedicated Server

I found it hard to believe, but suddenly I was faced with a real problem. Well, I suppose most people would not consider it a huge problem, quite the opposite, in fact. However, it was stressing me out complete, interfering with my writing. I even had trouble sleeping.

What was this horrendous problem? My web site was becoming very popular. So popular, in fact, that I was getting very worried about bandwidth charges.

You see, this was happening after September 11th, 2001, and I had been reading about some people who had created very special and beautiful sites. These sites were so incredible that they attracted lots and lots of visitors. So many visitors that they received hundreds of gigabytes worth of traffic. The webmasters suddenly found themselves charged hundreds or even thousands of dollars for using bandwidth over their allocations.

I had purchased a contract with a shared hosting service which allowed 27gb/month of traffic. This seemed like more than enough at the time. However, I was noticing the bandwidth increasing at an alarming rate - about 2gb/day. At that rate, I would exceed the allotment by quite a bit. I had some time, but not much.

Okay, what to do? I looked around at the various shared hosting options and didn't see much that was all that attractive. There were some that offered "unlimited" bandwidth - I didn't trust these at all. Most of the terms and conditions actually did place a "reasonable" limit of some kind. I preferred a limit that was know verses a limit that was unknown.

Actually, truth be known, I was getting a little tired of the paid host option. I mean, it's far improved from free hosts, but there is still much room for improvement. Some of the things that were bothering me were:

Downtime - All of the shared hosting servers that I'd checked out so far seemed to be down more often than desired. I've been in the computer industry for over 23 years, and to me a few hours of downtime in an entire year is about all that's acceptable. It's not that hard to achieve these kinds of statistics - I've been doing it myself for years.

Support - The level of support from virtually all hosting companies I've used to date has been pathetic to mediocre. My expectation is simple. My site is down, I want someone to work on it quickly. I want to call someone, get an answer right away, and get the problem resolved. Especially during normal business hours. I have never received that level of support from any hosting company yet.

Strange errors - I've noticed that my web sites will run fine for a few days or weeks, then start having strange delays. I know this because I monitor my sites with an automated service. These delays are probably caused by things that other customers are doing on the same server.

Lack of communication - Web host support people seem to forget that we webmasters and businessmen depend upon our web sites. I don't know about you, but if my site goes down for any length of time I completely freak out. I want to know why it's down and what's being done about it. And virtually always I get no answers. This is most annoying when the downtime has been planned - these hosts have my email address, why is it so hard to send an email and let me know what's going on?

Log file issues - Log files are very important to any true webmaster. They are useful for finding errors, gauging traffic and determining the success of promotions and articles. Yet so far all of the shared hosts gave me incredible grief about log files. They seemed to want to initialize them at odd intervals (unpredictable), didn't allow easy access, allowed too easy (unsecured) access and generally made it difficult.

Okay, given all of that, it was time to make a change. Not just a change to another host, but a change in paradigm.

I had tried free hosts (three of them) before deciding they were not at all suitable for anything except a small hobby web site. I moved up to paid shared hosts and for a while was happy. I moved, then moved again, then again. The hosts were all fine for a while, then starting having trouble.

Shared hosting was not doing what I needed. The straw that broke the camels back was a question of bandwidth. Internet Tips and Secrets was exceeding 50gb a month (almost four million hits and three quarters of a million page views). Wow.

I could not find a shared host that offered a package of a full gigabyte of disk and upwards of 50gb a month. Not a single one after looking at over a hundred different packages.

I had a real problem. You see, go over the monthly bandwidth charge and you get smacked with huge overcharges. For the web host I had at the time, the charges were $6 per gigabyte. This would make my hosting bill very large indeed.

Thus I began looking for a dedicated hosting service. I quickly found a company and purchased a single month.

Here's what I got. A web server all to myself. I could define as many as 250 different web sites on the server, and I had complete control of the DNS. I had root access to the server (meaning I was more or less god on the box) and could literally do anything I wanted. I could install anything, do anything and control or not control everything.

I had 9gb of disk space. Best of all, the service provided a whooping 400gb of bandwidth usage per month. The server was extremely fast for my needs. All for around $200/month plus a setup fee.

The downside (there is always a downside, isn't there)? The price was a little steep, but a predictable $200 a month is far superior to a surprise $500 or even $100 hosting charge. They also didn't provide any real autoresponders (but I solved that by purchasing a package) or web based email. Their support is also very basic - they have a 24 hour help desk which is friendly and competent, but they do not appear to be technical heavyweights.

Thus I have now, after a week of hard work, begun a new adventure - a dedicated web server for the 16 sites that my wife and I own. So far, the experience is far superior to the shared hosting nightmares that I've been facing.

Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.