The only thing you need to get online and surf through the literally millions of websites on the net is an internet connection. These sites are available around the clock, every day of the year because these websites reside on computers which are constantly on and connected to the net ” something most computers are not designed to do. If you want to get your website up and running, then you’ll need to sign up for web hosting services.

There are many different types of web hosting service plans to choose from; while there are free hosting companies, these are not recommended (they tend to be relatively unreliable and are notorious for disappearing overnight). Instead of these free services, you should use commercially available web hosting services ” most of these services offer low cost web hosting services aimed at beginners, but there are plenty of more advanced options such as dedicated server hosting.

As far as most of the essentials go, dedicated web hosting works like shared web hosting. However, there is one big difference between the two; a dedicated server holds just one website. Is dedicated hosting the right choice for your website? In order to determine if this is for you, read the following items. If all of these are true, then a dedicated server is the right option for your site.

You Need Your Site To Be Safe

To make sure that your website is safe, you need to make sure that your database is protected with strong passwords and that any web applications you use are of the latest version to avoid serious exploits. But even if your website is well protected and your site is hosted on a cheaper shared server, you can still feel the impact of any attacks that are made to other sites that are hosted on the same server. But if you have your own dedicated server, there should be nothing to worry about if you keep your site secure because your site is the only one occupying the server.

You Want Your Website To Perform Well For Your Visitors

When traffic accumulates in a single website, the performance isnt affected all that much if the server specifications are high. But once you have lots of websites stored in that server and all the websites get large amounts of traffic, all visitors will suffer from slower speeds. This may not be very noticeable for simple page loading, but if your site has lots of multimedia content, slowdowns can occur and may frustrate your visitors. With a dedicated server, all of the servers resources are for your website ensuring maximum performance even during heavy traffic periods.

You Need Total Control Over Your Web Server

Shared hosting plans do give you control over uploading content to your site, installing applications and setting privileges for your content and applications. However, if you need some more extensive control over server-side function like changing VPS settings and allowing root privileges for several people to maintain your site, then a dedicated server hosting plan is the way to go. With business-oriented sites, a dedicated server is almost always a better choice, since you’ll want to have complete control over how your site and your server are set up and maintained.

If not all of these three conditions hold true for your website, then you can probably keep using shared hosting for the time being. Shared hosting is great for your site when it’s just getting started but as your site and your online business presence grow, you’ll need the control, the performance and the security which a dedicated server provides.