Simply having a website isn’t enough to ensure business success these days. Businesses need websites that are immersive, highly-customized, and lighting fast to ensure the best user experience possible.
Dedicated hosting allows you to have this type of website, which is precisely why some companies choose it over shared hosting. In this post, we’ll explore when dedicated hosting makes a difference for a business in an effort to help you determine if it’s the right choice for you.
Dedicated Hosting: What Is It?
Dedicated hosting is a type of managed hosting that grants you access to an entire server that hosts just your website. With exclusive rights to use a server, you won’t have any “neighbors,” and as a result you get all the resources with that server including things like RAM, storage, bandwidth, etc.
Business websites that are growing rapidly and/or already have high-traffic will benefit the most from dedicated hosting. While dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, this additional cost comes with numerous benefits. These benefits include, but aren’t limited to:
- Better retention rates
- Improved reliability and performance
- Enhanced security
- Frontend and backend improvements, and
- Hardware maintenance
Now that you know the benefits, let’s break them down further so you get a better understanding of why dedicated hosting is sometimes preferred for businesses.
Better Retention Rates
Customers are your harshest critics. In our fast-paced and tech-centric world, customers expect your website to load at the snap of their fingers. Any longer, and you are likely to lose a good portion of your potential customers.
One of the biggest advantages of dedicated hosting is that your website will load fast. Even with high traffic or fancy website gadgets, the bandwidth of a dedicated server should be enough to power your website with ease.
Faster load times drive up retention rates because customers will have fewer opportunities to get distracted or frustrated with your website. With dedicated hosting, you won’t be giving your potential customers an excuse to move onto a competitor.
Improved Reliability and Performance
With exclusive access to a server, your website is all but guaranteed peak performance and reliability. This reliability means less frequent server crashes and better load times which contribute to optimum customer satisfaction. After all, a website that repeatedly crashes or is slow to load is not what your business wants to be known for.
Enhanced Security
Regardless of the type of business you run, it’s likely that you work with confidential customer information like names, addresses, and payment methods. As a business owner, the last thing you want is for this sensitive information to be leaked and for your reputation to be tarnished as a result of a data breach.
With dedicated hosting, you won’t have to experience the “bad neighbor” effect that comes with shared hosting. There’s no longer the threat of sharing a server with malicious websites, bots, or potentially dangerous spammers, and being impacted negatively by association.
Did you know that in some cases, websites under the same shared host server share the same exact IP? What this means is, if a website is breached, yours can be impacted in terms of SEO rankings simply because you’re on the same server. To make matters worse, these problems are largely, if not completely, out of your control. If that wasn’t bad enough, when a website on a shared server is attacked by something like malware for example, some codes are written to infect other websites on shared servers. This can result in your website being infected and/or blacklisted from search results.
While you can take precautions such as installing malware detection and removal software, installing web application firewalls, changing passwords, implementing multifactor authentication, etc. If you run a company that needs to keep confidential personal and customer data safe and sound, dedicated hosting may be your safest option.
Frontend Improvements
On the front end of your website, you’ll be able to add as many fancy widgets, interactive photos, and videos as you would like. Combined with an updated website design, these added features can make your business appear more professional.
Compared to shared hosting, dedicated hosting grants you enough processing power and bandwidth to add immersive features without sacrificing load times.
Backend Improvements
The beauty of having exclusive rights to a dedicated hosting server is that you don’t have to share resources with anyone. With root access and full customizability, backend applications can be tailored to your business needs. Need more security? Need a special function? As long as someone working on your server has the technical skills to make it happen, the opportunities are limitless.
Hardware Is Maintained
Dedicated hosting relieves the burden of maintaining and storing your own hosting equipment. While your website is the only one on the server, the hardware and network software is still being maintained by a provider. Therefore, there’s no need to worry about monitoring performance, replacing aging parts, and/or conducting routine server updates.
Interested in learning more about Dedicated Hosting Services with Xfernet? Click here for pricing and details.