If you’re new to web hosting, you may have heard of dedicated servers, but are not quite sure as to what they are and whether you need one yourself. Well, I’m here to hopefully alleviate the questions or concerns you may have. First, lets start off with…

 

What is a dedicated server?

Lets use an analogy. In this case, lets compare a dedicated server to a car. More specifically, your parents car. You’ve just turned the legal driving age and what’s the first thing most new drivers want to do? They want to ask their parents to loan them their car so they can go pick up their friends and drive them around. However, your parents car comes with stipulations. No eating in the car. No playing music loudly in the car. No more than 3 people in the car at a time. You have stipulations placed on what you can do with the vehicle since you do not own it. You’re sharing the car with your parents.

So lets fast forward a bit in time here. You’ve saved up enough money to purchase your own vehicle. No more not eating in the car. In fact, the first thing you do is have a big fat juicy burger from your favorite restaurant and eat it in your car with the music blasting at full volume. Now that it’s your car, no one can tell you what you can and can’t do within it.

That is what having a dedicated server is like. A dedicated server is like purchasing your own vehicle. No need to share memory, hard drive space, processing power or bandwidth. Since its your dedicated server, you can do with it as you please. This is just one of the many advantages that having your own dedicated server provides you. Speaking of advantages…

 

Advantages of a dedicated server

Sticking with the car analogy we started in the previous section, let’s list some of the advantages of owning your own car. You no longer have to ask people for rides. You set your own rules of what is and is not permissible in your vehicle. No more waiting on public transportation. You go to an event and want to leave early? You can hop in your car and leave whenever you see fit. Now let’s translate that into some of the advantages of a dedicated server.

 

1. Performance

This is one of the main benefits of having a dedicated server. Since you’re not sharing any resources with any other client, your performance will be greatly enhanced. Do you want to allocate more memory to your web server so that your site will load faster? Go right ahead. Want to limit the amount of connections people can make to your website? No one will stop you. Have a large spike of traffic due to a promotion you have running on your website? No worries about having to share bandwidth with any other client. You see, with a dedicated server, you control the environment which invariably leads to better performance as all your resources can be dedicated to just your site and no one else’s. This alone will allow you to see VAST performance improvements over a shared hosting plan. Have someone who is attempting to break into your server and you need to increase your security? Well read on to the next section…

 

2. Security

You wake up one morning, have your coffee and check your email. Upon checking your email you notice that you have hundreds of notifications about a brute force attack on your server. You immediately login to your server and blacklist the offending IP address. Upon further investigation, you find that one of your sites has been the target. Hackers are attempting to access the site to upload exploited code to your website. You reach out to your senior security engineer and have them give the website a thorough looking over. Your not engineer informs you that he needs to perform a security audit on the entire server. He shuts down password authentication to your server and makes it so that users need to have a key to access your server. The engineer then adjusts the limits for how quickly an IP will be blocked after failed login attempts. A malware scan is placed on the server and set to run every day. As you can see from this example, security is another large advantage of having a dedicated server. You can tighten the reins or loosen them on your server at your own discretion. You can customize your server to fit your needs which brings us to my last point.

 

3. Customization

Continuing with the example from the security section, you have the ability to customize your server. Whether this be your firewall or installing new software onto your server. You can install backup software. You can reformat the server and install a different operating system. You can change your control panel to anything that you may like, such as cPanel, Plesk, etc. Taking this further back up to the performance section of having your own car, you can customize the car to fit your needs the same as you can do with a dedicated server.

 

Hopefully now based off the sections above, you feel a little bit more at ease about dedicated servers. In fact, if you’re looking to purchase a dedicated server, you should head over to http://turnkeyinternet.net/dedicated-servers/ and check out our *BEST VALUE* dedicated servers.

 

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