Even for a person who doesn't know too much about servers, the advantages are clear right from the start: you, as the webmaster, have full control over YOUR OWN server, including options of what operating system to use, the type of hardware, etc. You can customize everything according to your own personal desires, while the administration is handled by the hosting company.

The most important advantage of using an online dedicated web hosting is that your website performance (like loading time, which is an important factor for your visitors) will not be affected by the traffic of the other websites with which you would have been sharing your server's bandwidth.

The online dedicated web hosting environment provides you with an exclusive server or servers devoted to the sole purpose of serving yourself and your business only. You do not share hard disk space with other customers, and you avoid shared hosting.

Before dedicated web hosting existed, a web site developer used to have two hosting options, the low-priced shared hosting model and the premium-priced dedicated web hosting. A person who bought space on a shared host would get a certain amount of disk space and monthly transfer, and would have the web site served from a common web server.

The hosting company, in its' attempt to increase the popularity of their products, would provide a wide range of options for the web site developer. But, limitations would still be there. For example, if a customer needed a non-standard program installed or maybe wanted to use a privileged account in order for a particular utility to run, he would be completely not be able to achieve these goals.

A good example would be a web site which required a database to store the precious information in. Many hosting companies provide the standard MySQL database to use on their servers. If your application requires another type of database though, then it could prove to be incompatible with the shared hosting account. And trust me, databases are a very important element in the success of your internet business.

A dedicated web server can be customized anyway you want. But, there's also a catch. Because it can handle much more traffic than a shared hosting account, the far better performance doesn't come cheap. On average, dedicated web hosting can cost the savvy webmaster hundreds of dollars per month depending on the size of the server, network connectivity and the amount of management required from the hosting company.

Webmasters who don't quite fit into the standard shared hosting model and find that it doesn't work for them, or whose sites grow very popular and require a large amount of resources have the alternative of dedicated web hosting.