When you find that your site is growing steadily and you need more resources, you will be forced to crawl out of your shared hosting space and move onto either VPS or dedicated hosting. When the traffic to the site is quite high and you need a high server uptime, it is better to sign up for a dedicated server. Dedicated servers are not only reliable and robust; they are more secure and scalable. You get to enjoy all the resources of the server exclusively and this means an access to resources as and when needed. You can even tweak the servers to meet your business objectives. For companies which are planning to sign up for dedicated hosting from a VPS hosting environment the transition is perhaps easier.
Before you take on a dedicated server, your first task is to assess your business needs and then opt for a server accordingly. It is not advisable to choose the latest and most feature-rich plans if your business will not benefit from those in any way. You need to understand how much growth is expected over the next few years and then choose your server accordingly. So, you should basically check your future projections for RAM, CPU cores, operating system, bandwidth and space and the types of storage you will need, whether HDDs or SSDs. It is interesting to see that each of these factors has its related costs. For instance, the SSDs are going to be far costlier than HDDs as they guarantee much higher speeds. Likewise, Linux dedicated plans are likely to be cheaper than the Windows dedicated plans because Windows has licensing fees.
Another easy tip to maximize the power of your dedicated servers is to take over as much of the management tasks as is possible. When you choose VPS hosting, as a user you can enjoy far greater freedom because you are granted root access to the virtual servers. But, in dedicated hosting, this freedom is much limited when you choose managed dedicated hosting plans. The host, in this situation, will control the systems; take care of OS and software updates, automated backups and security patches, load balancing, disaster recovery solutions, anti-virus scans, auto scaling configurations etc. So, while server management does indeed take up a lot of time and demands expertise, it is perhaps wise to choose a cheap priced dedicated hosting plan which you can manage. You can then introduce changes which you feel will maximize the power of your dedicated server.
Downtime costs are huge and companies may end up losing billions every year if this is not controlled. Data center outages are not uncommon as was seen even in the case of the retail giant Amazon very recently. For being offline for only 3 hours, the company ended up losing as much as $150 million. You will find that there are web hosting companies which reserve their finest uptime guarantees for the top tier customers. Although there are quite a few hosts which claims to guarantee 100% uptime, this is not the truth and customers can be satisfied with a 99% uptime which accounts for about less than an hour of downtime every month.
The best way to improve the performances of dedicated servers is to protect them through high end security measures. While controlling the server on your own can give you the freedom you are looking for, at the same time, it can expose your company to risks unless you are careful about the security of the server. Hacking attempts are common and every year businesses lose more than $400 billion. Much of these crimes are not even reported or detected on time. The criminals hold information hostage till the owner pays up ransom. So, you need to get a provider which will not compromise on security aspects; it should guarantee effective firewalls, SSL certificates and DDoS protection. It should have effective backup provisions for restoring valuable data.
Rather than choosing the cloud, having a scalable dedicated environment works better for most businesses. Even a modest traffic spike in the cloud can force you to spend a much higher amount to get resources. Instead a scalable dedicated hosting plan is far better; you can choose the server and you can guarantee that your website will grow steadily. When the traffic grows, you can prepare to add more space or bandwidth.
Finally, when you have a dedicated server you can enjoy 24×7 supports free of cost. This support is made available through live chats, emails and toll-free phone calls. When you choose managed hosting, you can be certain that expert help will be there at any time of the day or night, when you face any kind of crisis. So, before you choose a host, you need to test their average response time to technical issues. Hosts which offer video tutorials, community forums and knowledgebase for clients are reliable.
You can maximize your dedicated server by controlling server customizations and keeping more funds for upgrades. Whether it is DDoS protections, dedicated IP addresses, disaster recovery solutions, data availability, firewalls and caching tools, you can customize these as per your needs. You do not need a host which can guarantee you the highest computing power or the best storage. You need to analyze your business needs and then focus on features which you think deserve priority.
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