Every business knows the purpose of owning a website is to ensure they have a platform to contact and communicate with their clients and customers (both current and potential). They also know their site should provide the most optimal experience.
This User Experience (or UX) starts right from the moment a visitor types in a few keywords in a search engine looking for a website and ends when, after delivery of offered products and services, they leave the website. A site owner should focus on every potential action that could occur between these two instances in order to provide the best experience possible and ensure a user returns.
With that in mind, businesses should know that having the ideal website can never be achieved if the hosting server it sits on is poor. Any castle built on sand will eventually come down.
Hosting a website on a dedicated server is one of the ways a business can make sure it has a reliable platform that can meet the ever-changing, high-standard expectations of today’s visitors. While it is the more-expensive side of hosting a website (despite prices continuing to plunge), dedicated website hosting is a good way to ensure better UX. Here’s how.
Faster Loading Times – Everyone is in a great rush today, and money is really measured in time. No one will want to spend time on a site that lags and takes ages to load (even if it is just a few seconds.)
Having your website sit on a dedicated server will ensure you don’t have to share your resources with other websites that could potentially hog your bandwidth and processing power. With good speed, you’ll have happy customers.
No Blacklisting – Unless you yourself have a website deemed to be malicious or one that offers illegal, harmful, or offensive goods and services, the risks of having your IP address blocked or your website blacklisted are negligible.
Shared web hosting is built on the concept of dividing a server’s space and its resources among all the websites that reside on it. Yet, the IP addresses (there could be more than one) remain the same and are shared among the clients. If one of these clients falls afoul with search engines, your site will also face the consequences as the digital world will see both your sites as one simply because you share the same IP address.
Having your own server will help you offer the premium services you intend to without having to pay for other’s sins.
Tweaking And Configuration Rights – If you intend to meet all your clients’ requirements, or try to address as many of them as possible, you will need the rights to go under the hood of your server and tinker with it every now and then. As your website grows and you implement new features, you will need to configure your server to entertain the enhancements. This is something you won’t be able to do in a shared hosting environment, as the providers would rather you (and all the other tenants on their servers) conform to their choices and configurations than having you address your own requests.
Improved Security – While most hosting providers take immense care in ensuring the security of their servers, hosting disk space with more than one client can open the doors to security overlaps.
With your own dedicated server you can lock it down, add all the security features you deem necessary, keep all logins and privileges under your control, and not have to pay for someone else’s security blunders. This is something your customers and clients will really appreciate, especially if they entrust you with their confidential information.
Unlimited Traffic Handling – If there is a surge in traffic, whether sudden or over an extended period of time, dealing with the ramifications can be a nightmare. You then have to worry about expanding disk space, bandwidth, and processing power to accommodate the surge. They may say it’s a breeze to deal with, but don’t be fooled.
While many hosting providers promise up-scalability with little to no downtime, few actually deliver come traffic-surge time. Apart from the technical issues involved in having to take into consideration the needs of other cohabitants on the server, there’s the consideration of allocation of resources. Many providers would rather you moved to a new dedicated server than disrupting the status quo.
So, if you haven’t made the conscious decision to move on to a dedicated server, do so now for the sake of your users. Know that it will eventually pay off!
