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What are the advantages of a dedicated hosting service?
We are going to purchase some sort of hosted server solution, but haven’t decided whether or not to go dedicated or shared hosting. What do you recommend? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using dedicated hosting?
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6 Answers
Dedicated Hosting Pros:
- Customizable to specific apps
- more secure, no sharing space with 100s of other sites
- all resources are available and predictable
- industry compliance requires dedicated resources. SAS, HIPPA, PCI
- server based apps can be loaded, exchange, databases, CRMs, etc. and
customized to specific business needs
- Security controls are based on specific customer policy, not the masses.
- non shared bandwidth or risk of reduced resource due to over utilized.
Cons:
- price
- non approved apps being installed, causing instability of server
- critical patches not always being updated unless OS is controlled by
hosting provider
- bandwidth scalability, usage of processing/storage may not be quick to
scale.
- single point of failure if dedicated server fails.
Depending on the needs I would recommend a dedicated managed server. We quote new managed high end blade servers from $350+/mth includes b/w, power, support etc.
Jay,
What application(s) are you looking to host? Email, documents, apps?
There are several reasons as to why an individual, business or other organization might decide to use a dedicated server to host their websites. Dedicated server hosting can provide many benefits to a hosting client depending on their particular needs and the function of their website. Dedicated server hosting is typically more reliable and secure than shared hosting services. Dedicated hosting allows a customer to customize their hosting experience, which is not usually the case with shared hosting services.
Hi Jay,
I think this is quite an old query. I wonder and hope it still is relevant to you.
Manish & Tony had kind of enumerated the pros/cons, reasonably well.
I would like to add a dimension to this discussion. Over the last few months, with the advent of cloud or on-demand hosting, a user can avail the benefits of both shared and dedicated hosting:
a) it is on-demand hosting so you can add resources at will, circumventing the need for the complexity of adding/installing dedicated server resources.
b)it is minimum defined resources so the issues of shared hosting do not exist
c) it is pay as you go pricing, so the cost is lesser than dedicated hosting in most cases
d) there is no single point of failure - cloud environments are redundant hardware infrastructures, with an extremely low failure
probability
Hope this helps.
Cheers!
I'd like to create a scenario to help you understand shared vs dedicated...
Imagine you had two friends.
One – let’s call him Joe - lives in a small student house. Although Joe has his own room, he shares his kitchen and bathroom with other people on same floor. Joe’s neighbours are constantly having parties (especially on weeknights) and he hears everything through the thin walls. He is involved in all their problems and his neighbours often have questionable guests making Joe feel his security is at risk.
Your other friend – Anna – lives in a luxurious house in a safe quiet neighbourhood. The only common area she comes close to sharing with her neighbours is the entrance to her street. She isn’t bothered by her neighbours, even when they have parties, because she can’t hear them through her thick secure walls. She is isolated from all their problems and feels safe in her home.
Now which one would you rather be? Exactly.
The premium solution in this case would be dedicated virtual private server, you get the performance of a dedicated server for a fraction of the cost. It has many benefits such as 0% downtime, instant scalability, extensive daily back up and much more... For more information, take a look at Atum's plans...
http://www.atum.com/unmanaged_vps.php
Thanks :)
Hi,
it depends on what do you call shared hosting. Do you mean shared hosting "webpacks" (web storage, ftp, email, DB) or do you mean Virtual Private Servers. They are often called Virtual dedicated server just to visualize the difference between those two "shared-hosting" solutions (webpack VPS).
- Webpacks are designed for less performance requiring sites
- VPS - depends on which virtualization technique you will take - I recommend paravirtualized completely isolated solution - Xen based Virtual Servers. Another advantage is the option you may do it clustered.
- dedicated : standalone non-shared server, more secure not only because of nonexistent 'neighbours', performance and ressource managent etc
The hardware nowadays is from day to day more and more powerfull, more suitable for virtualization and hosters are taking advantage of it in increasing the density. In other words there are often about 100 Virtual Servers on one dedicated server, probably less secure comparing to a box where you're 'alone'.
My recommendation is dedicated server and virtualization on top of it. In this case you can create as many virtual servers as you need (as many ressources you have) that means isolating every important application server (dns, mail, web, collab, corp page, internal project managent, CRM, ecommerce etc) to a separate Virtual Server. The fundamentals of security are in running minimum of services on every box and separating them.
In case you need just few services running, take a VPS.
Regards,
Adrian
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