Every website has to be hosted on a web server and dedicated hosting seems to be a popular option. When your website grows beyond the shared hosting space, you may have to take a call on choosing between dedicated hosting and cloud services. Here are five reasons why you must go for dedicated hosting.

No hidden costs

Cost is an important consideration while selecting your host. The biggest advantage of dedicated hosting is that the costing is clear and without any ambiguity. You know what you are paying for. You have a wide variety of choice. Some websites require high computing speed. For example, if you have a computational site, your processing speed or microprocessor must have multiple cores with sufficient RAM. In case you have high storage requirement, you can go for a high capacity hard disk. You can have various combinations and permutations in dedicated hosting.

You can also select a plan for which you can be charged monthly, quarterly or annually. Your DNS can be configured according to your specific requirement. This is an important consideration which is often overlooked. DNS plays a critical role in how your website performs under different conditions. Sometimes traffic to a site may be sporadic and change with time. While choosing a dedicated hosting service you can go through your requirements with a toothcomb. In other hosting services you may have to opt for a standard menu, wherein you may have to pay for services which you don’t need. Your overall cost of hosting may eventually go up due to this reason. With dedicated hosting you will pay exactly for what you get or want.

Custom setup

To begin with, you can choose the type of operating system. Both Microsoft Windows and Open source Linux are popular though you may have to pay more for the former. The choice depends on the kind of applications you are likely to run on your dedicated server.

Linux with Apache web servers are quite popular because you can run almost any application with it. LAMP or Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP are a great combination because the software is open source and can be modified by users. You don’t have this privilege with Microsoft products. Moreover, most dedicated servers already have LAMP preloaded.

WordPress has moved from being purely a blogging platform. In fact, many businesses and ecommerce sites run on WordPress. With dedicated hosting you can easily setup WordPress without bothering your pocket. In comparison, you may have to install WordPress in other hosting plans.

There are many applications, like animation and streaming which can be easily configured with a dedicated server. Streaming services, for instance may not be easily configurable in other environment. Even if you may be able to get your applications or services running, you may have to pay more for them. Finally, you may end up paying more than originally planned for.

Plenty of storage

When we choose a hosting service we seldom think of storage requirements. In many cases, storage cost increases exponentially once you exceed the contracted space. In the case of dedicated servers, you have plenty of storage and you can add hard disks without feeling the pain in terms of cost.

If you are into video services of any kind, you will need a huge amount of storage. This requirement can only be fulfilled by having your own hard disks. The same goes for animation websites. In fact, raw storage for animation can be phenomenal. You would also need a dedicated server to manage the pipeline. Even otherwise, a serious website would require space for storage of images. In all such cases, dedicated hosting may be the only viable option.

Location of server

In marketing there is a saying that the most important factor is location. The same holds true for hosting. Everyone is aware that your server must be as close to the customer as possible. For example, if you are in Frankfurt you should, as far as possible, be located in the same city or thereabout. This is only possible if you opt for dedicated hosting. You can choose the datacenter closest to your client. Moreover, details of the datacenter in which your server is located can be obtained by you.

The download speed or time is a factor in SEO as well. Research has shown that websites can lose considerable amount of traffic due to slow page downloads. This aspect of your website performance can be monitored and managed by you in case of dedicated hosting.

Another aspect to be considered is the ease of configuring dedicated server with a CDN network. Using CDN or Content Delivery Network you can speed up page download for visitors around the globe. Obviously you may have to pay for the CDN services separately. However, you may be lucky if your hosting service has an understanding with CDN providers.

No technical expertise required

The best part about dedicated hosting is that you need not maintain technical staff for managing your server. You can opt for managed services and the entire maintenance work can be offloaded to the hosting provider. In case you don’t want to go for managed services, you can always pay for services as you go along.

Maintenance of servers is important due to several reasons. You have to keep your operating system updated periodically. In addition your applications and other software may require upgrading. Moreover, installing firewall and anti-virus software has become important. Malware and virus attacks can quickly undo all the work you have done in creating your website. It’s better to pay a small sum today than lose the entire business altogether.

Conclusion

In addition to these five, there are other benefits in choosing dedicated hosting. Since dedicated hosting has been around for many years, all the kinks and wrinkles have been ironed out. Dedicated hosting is a time tested scheme. There are no black areas which would give you a nasty surprise along with your bill.