When you start your business on the internet, your purpose could be served by using shared servers. But, as your business grows, you would find this arrangement to be inconvenient to you and may even act as a hindrance for farther growth of your business. When you shared your server space, you might have faced with the problem of down time and very little security. Therefore, as your business grows you might like to shift your web site to a dedicated server.
This dedicated server would provide service only to you and it will be a separate piece of hardware. These dedicated servers would allow you to install and run almost any program in your system. You may even allow others to connect to your and use the programs available on the machine while you are also using them. These features have made dedicated servers quite popular amongst internet game enthusiasts.
Considering that these dedicated servers would cost you more, let us enumerate some of the benefits you will reap by using such a server.
Most dedicated servers are generally fully customized to cater to all of your requirements. You may choose the operating system you want (Linux or Windows), the programs you want to install. In case, you require extensive use of database, you could also decide the kind of database software to be used (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL etc.).
Dedicated server would host your website and applications exclusively. Therefore, you will not face the problem of congestion caused by requests made by other websites or applications residing on same machine. On a shared server, the speed at which your application would be running would depend on amount of traffic on the server produced by other web sites co hosted on it. By hosting your website on a dedicated server, you would be able to utilize the entire bandwidth for your exclusive use only. Shared web sites also carry the risk of getting affected by virus because of programs being uploaded to other websites located on the same server machine.
Because of the exclusiveness of your server, there is much less security threat or chances of virus attack unless they are put there by you.
Another advantage of having a dedicated server is that your server will be assigned with a unique IP address. In case of a number of websites hosted on the same server, they are assigned the same IP address to all of them.
And the biggest advantage of having a dedicated server is the ease of applying updates to your site in terms of software, extra bandwidth, increasing processor speed, adding more RAM or any other piece of hardware.
Additional utility of having a dedicated server is that it provides the facility of providing with FTP backup account for your system where you could store your mirror backup.
You are the owner of your site. Consider all these points before deciding whether you should go for such a dedicated server.