Is Your Dedicated Server Worth It?

When you start looking at different web hosting companies and all the different service plans they have to offer, you will also be offered a dedicated server. This simply means that you share your server with no one else. The server only works for your site, unless of course you decide to share this piece of hardware with other sites.

This will be a hard decision; first of all it will be a lot of money to have your own dedicated server. There are more decisions to make here, far above the dollar outlay for a dedicated server.

The first thing to think about is the performance factor. Of course, when you have just your site on one server, you are going to get great performance, and that is important. Studies have shown that if your web site is slow,  the visitor will hesitate for approximately ten seconds then move on to another site. So it sounds like an easy decision, you want performance. The problem with this thinking is that there are any number of locations between you and your visitor that could cause these delays; it is not just your server.

However, you really should eliminate your server as being the problem of slow response time. After all, this is one of the few problems that you have control over.

So if you have decided that the most important thing is to have control over the most things you can, and you are really considering a dedicated server, security should be your next priority. With all the problems out there with regards to viruses and spam, you certainly stand a much better chance of containing an attack when you are the only site on the server. The problem is much easier to solve if you aren’t sharing your server with several other sites.

The advantage of having a dedicated server for spam and virus problems is that if you are the only site, the chances that you will get infected are much less in the first place. You can also control the security measures that you implement on your server. When you have other sites on your server you cannot control what kind of security they have.

If you are sharing a server, to protect yourself the best you need to know if your hosting company is using one IP address per server. This can cause havoc with security issues as some viruses are targeted at the IP address directly. This type of set up can leave you wide open for attack.

Another problem you can have when you share a server is if a site you are sharing the server with is doing something not quite right and gets banned, with a shared address, you have a possibility of being banned also. An example of this is if one of the people you share the server with is a spammer and he gets caught, you, because of the IP address situation may be blacklisted and banned too.

It may cost more money but what you spend in money you will save in headaches, give dedicated hosting a good look, it just may be worth it.