Dedicated Servers: Providing Security, Reliability and Performance

The term dedicated hosting describes a hosting plan that dedicates physical server resources to a single client. It is also referred to as dedicated server and managed hosting service. It is the most flexible type of hosting service money can buy, because the resources aren’t shared with anyone else and the client has full control over them. They can choose hardware, operating systems and the rest of the software they are going to use. The expenses of using a dedicated server includes licensing for Windows and other paid software that might be required.

Dedicated hosting is ideal for large-scale applications and websites that have huge amounts of traffic. This is because within a shared hosting plan the client shares space with other clients and within a VPS hosting plan, they share the same physical server. But with dedicated hosting, they have an entire server all to themselves, along with all of its resources. The prices of these dedicated hosting plans vary depending on the amount of resources that are being used.

Dedicated hosting plans are great for large companies and websites that have to deal with high amounts of traffic. It is also good in case a client wants to launch their own custom application and requires full control over the server they use. Clients can configure the server to match their exact needs and use its processing power to the fullest.

In case the client doesn’t have the technical skills necessary to manage the entirety of their server, they can choose to use dedicate managed servers. These are usually more expensive, because the hosting company doesn’t just provide a physical server but an engineer as well. The engineer’s responsibility will be to configure the server, install the necessary software packages and to keep it running smoothly at all times.

Reasons To Use Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is the most expensive type of hosting plan money can buy, but not without a reason. It is also the most reliable and most powerful service you can have and it can really benefit your company if you have one. Here are the main reasons you should consider using dedicated hosting services.

Powerful Performance

Dedicated hosting services offer the best performance for your dollars. The disk input and output is even superior to cloud hosting. With cloud hosting, your disk input and output can be unpredictable, while it’s much more stable with dedicated hosting. Also, because your dedicated server is completely isolated from the rest of the client’s servers, it is bound to perform at high speed. You won’t see your website or online service slow down or lagging.

Unshakable Uptime

In our world, convenience is everything and nobody likes to wait for anything, especially if they are looking to spend money. Ensuring that your website is available throughout every second of the year is crucial. It should be functional at all times with no downtime, because your dysfunctional site might lead users to your competitors. Which is why it’s smart to use dedicated hosting if you have some serious online operations. Dedicated hosting services offer virtually 100% uptime. That might only drop down to 99.98%, because no system is perfect. But with that, you can rest assured that your site and your business operations won’t have more than a few seconds of downtime throughout a year. If the provider offers support and server management alongside the dedicated server, than there’s nothing stopping your server from constantly carrying out the required operations.

The bandwidth is also much more reliable than with any other hosting type. Your dedicated server will have a 100Mbps connection and you can use it without limitations. Your site and service also won’t lose any bandwidth because there’s nobody to share the resources with. This top of the notch bandwidth will be reliable at all times, ensuring that your applications are always up and running, even if you get a high traffic spike.

Better Security

With shared and VPS hosting services, security is a much greater issue because of the shared physical space. This often means that if one website is infected with malware, than it will spread to the rest of the server and your website as well, which can be incredibly problematic. It can cause problems even if the right security measures are in place.

Dedicated servers have the advantage of physical security, which drastically lowers the chance of anyone penetrating them. They also have the benefit of more tailored security measures like mantraps, biometric authentication, VAPT, application firewall and security guards.

Dedicated hosting also has much better disaster preparedness. Your hosting provider has the right protocols in case a disaster strikes. Most hosting facilities are designed as bank vaults, so they can withstand almost any potential threat. With backup solutions, you can also ensure that your data and online resources are always reachable, even if a disaster strikes.

Frees Up Your Staff

With your server being within a safe space, far away from your company base, you don’t need anyone in the IT department focusing on maintaining your server. Instead, you can have them focus on strategic tasks like developing a new application or helping your business grow. There’s no need to dispense any manpower on routine maintenance chores.

With a managed dedicated server, all the chores will be done by the company of your choosing and all you have to do is to leverage the power you’re provided with.

Better Support

Managed dedicated hosting services have the best support. But even if you’re choosing to manage the server on your own, you’ll have a decent support team that you can call 24/7/365. Because a lot of dedicated hosting users depend on their dedicated servers to help them carry out mission crucial tasks, the company’s support teams pay more attention on them. You can always know the exact level of support you’re going to get with your dedicated server by reading the service level agreement of the company. There you can have a clear look at exactly what kind of service you’re going to get. You’ll want to make sure that the company has the necessary knowledge to manage your server as effectively as possible.

The Best Dedicated Server Providers

When it comes to buying dedicated hosting services there are some awesome companies who have outgrown and outperformed others on the market. They also have some really reasonable prices, so it’s worth at least checking all of them out if you’re looking for a decent dedicated hosting provider.

Liquid Web

Liquid Web has established some incredibly solid foundations on the web hosting market. They have a team that’s full of energy and enthusiasm and they’ll make your day brighter with every encounter. You’ll get more enthusiastic yourself when you see how much love and passion these people have for their craft, building and managing web servers. This passion is converted into some truly high quality technological services.

Liquid Web is currently helping some huge online brands in maintaining their services. The likes of Home Depot, Symantec, and National Geographic are all relying on them to keep their data safe and reachable at all times.

But Liquid Web isn’t the type of company that provides shared hosting plans. Their core services are VPS and dedicated hosting. They are devoted to providing the highest quality of hosting services and all the speed that you could possibly get out of their machines, but ask for the price as well.

When it comes to server uptime and speed, it’s truly outstanding. Loading times are as fast as 300 – 500 milliseconds and uptime is 99.99%. All of your data will be stored on SSDs with RAID protection, which further adds to the safety, speed and reliability of the service.

Making Liquid Web’s plans even better, is their great support service. Since you’ll be paying for a dedicated server which costs quite a lot of cash, you can expect them to always be at your service 24/7/365. They know you’re storing and handling sensitive data, so they’ll make sure that you can rely on them 100%.

You can also leave your website within their capable hands. Liquid Web offers managed hosting service as well, so you don’t necessarily have to have technical skills if you have the money. There are a variety of managed dedicated hosting services, you just need to choose the one that suits you. In that case, all you have to do is build and maintain your business.

A lot of people recommend Liquid Web, it was even recommended to me as well. Their dedicated servers start at $199 per month. For that amount of money, you’ll get an Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 server computer that has a single quad core 3.4 GHz processor, 16 GB of RAM, 2 x 250 GB SSD Primary Storage, a 1 TB SATA backup drive and 5 TB of monthly bandwidth. If you want a more powerful PC, the price will increase by $100 or $200 per month, depending on which plan you choose.

So, if you’re looking for something truly reliable and powerful for your money, Liquid Web is the way to go.

HostGator

If someone can offer compelling web hosting services, than it is HostGator. It is one of the oldest and most successful companies on the market. The company has managed to turn itself into a real whale within the ocean of web hosting and for good reasons. They always managed to bring some high-quality hosting services to their clients at a more than reasonable price. But there was also a lot of controversy surrounding the company, because a lot of users weren’t satisfied with their services. It’s not hard to find the comments of dissatisfied users all over the web. Yet hundreds of thousands of users still stick around and enjoy HostGator’s services, so it’s really up to you which whether you’re willing to experiment or not. HostGator definitely has a lot of good to offer in the Dedicated Server department.

The price for their first dedicated hosting plan is as low as $119 per month. The server will have a 4 Core / Thread Intel Xenon-D CPU, 8 GB of RAM, 1 TB of Hard Disk Space, Unmetered Bandwidth. It will also let you install your operating system of choice, either Linux or Windows.

If you perhaps want to save more money and would like to get your dedicated server a lot cheaper, that can definitely be arranged. HostGator offers a „Legacy Server” plan for $79.00 / month. It will provide you with a server that has a 2 Core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, a 0.5 TB HDD, 10 TB of Bandwidth and your operating system of choice. Keep in mind that you will be in charge of managing this server and you’ll have to call the support team separately if you need help with it. So make sure that you have the technical knowledge necessary to configure it to run your website or online service as smoothly as possible.

HostGator is pretty keen on making good deals as you can see, so you can definitely find yourself a hosting plan that you can afford. You needn’t tie yourself down right away, because you have a 45 day trial period, during which you can experiment with HostGator’s services. Use that time to figure out whether the service suits you or not and get your money back if you’re not satisfied!

HostGator is a great option if you’re looking for some dedicated horsepower at a low price. Check out their official website to find out more about these services.

InMotion

Few companies shout trust and reliability as loud as InMotion does. The company has been around for 16 years and has won many awards during their time. They got most for being some of the friendliest humans on the planet. Their call themselves the leaders in customer support and the definitely deserve the title. You’ll rarely have to wait more than 2 minutes to get a friendly response from one of their customer support representatives.

InMotion is currently home to more than 300,000 domain names and it’s a prime choice for beginners, bloggers, shop owners and enterprises alike. They easily attract clients because they will give nothing less than your money’s worth. In fact, they will give you more help and freebies than you would expect.

When it comes to InMotion’s dedicated servers, the price is pretty solid, regarding the amount of resources you’ll get. You can rest assured that their servers will perform at high speed, with loading times of 300 milliseconds. You don’t have to worry about safety and reliability either, because you’ll have a 99.95% uptime, so your site won’t suffer more than a few minutes of downtime every year.

You can start using InMotion’s dedicated hosted plan for $99.99 per month and have full control over your server. This plan will give you an Intel Xenon E3-1230 3.6 GHz Turbo Quad Core processor with 8 threads, 8 GB of RAM, 500 GB of SSD storage or 1 TB of 7.2K HDD storage, Software RAID, 6 TB Bandwidth and 5 IP addresses. That’s a pretty solid deal for $99.99 per month and it’s definitely on par with the other’s I’ve mentioned here.

The best part is that you can subscribe to it and have 90 days to try it out. During that 90 days, if you decide to cancel your subscription at any time, you can do it and get a full refund. If you’re interested or need more resources, just check out InMotion’s official website!

BlueHost

BlueHost is all about providing an economic web hosting solution for everyone. They offer some of the most low cost and stable hosting services out there, which is why they have gained a large user base. They are the favorite of a lot of WordPress users, and they are even among the top 3 recommended hosting services on WordPress.org’s official website. They really do run WordPress like a dream and can help the users with getting the hang of the system as well or solve a problem if necessary.

Today, BlueHost has about 2 million websites relying on its services, which is quite amazing. People trust it and rely on it, but I do have to mention that reviews on some websites are inconsistent. Some shared hosting users were dissatisfied with the level of support they received, stating that they had to wait about 40 minutes to get a response. Some said it to be days even. During our test, we waited about 25 minutes to get a representative to respond to us, which isn’t bad, but I’ve seen way better.

BlueHost has earned its reputation for being one of the most low-cost hosting providers on the market. Even their powerful dedicated hosting plan is below $100. It doesn’t go heavy on your wallet by any means, asking for only $79.99 per month. For that money, you’ll get a dedicated server that has a single CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads, 4 GB off RAM, 50 GB of storage, 3 IP addresses and 5 TB of premium bandwidth. There are also two other packages for $99.99 per month and $119.99 per month, that offer more server resources and IP addresses that you can use. If you’re looking for a truly low-cost dedicated hosting solution, BlueHost is the way to go.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is a famous domain registrar that has moved into the market of web hosting a couple of years ago. Business has been going well for them since they were already a household name among web masters and just about anyone who had a website.  They have been serving clients for more than 10 years now and achieved varying degrees of success. Their success wasn’t consistent over the past 2 years, because of a proliferation of negative comments on the internet. Some long time users were dissatisfied with the service they were receiving, compared to what they got about 5 years ago. Still, there are a lot of others who would argue that the service very much fits their demands. It’s hard to figure out which one is right because our experience was positive as well. You can brush this off, I just thought it was important to mention before we venture further.

GoDaddy attracts a lot of attention because they managed to keep their prices down low enough that most people, even individuals can enjoy their services. The same goes for dedicated servers, because GoDaddy offers prices just as low as BlueHost does. There’s only a few dollar difference between the two, so it’s worth looking into it if you want something inexpensive yet reliable.

It’s also worth mentioning that GoDaddy doesn’t use misleading pricing tricks that would cause a surprise once you try to renew your plan.  They state how much the plan will cost after one year passes and you try to renew it. This is a very positive trait, since most hosting providers (even the good ones) use misleading pricing tricks to lure in customers.

If you’re starting a business, like an online service that needs the resources and horsepower, GoDaddy’s services can definitely provide the foundation for your website.

You can choose your dedicated server to have Linux or Windows as its operating system, which is something that most hosting providers let you do for yourself. The uptime is rock solid, so you can expect your website to be reachable 99.99% of the year. The lineup of their services start with the Economy plan which costs £55.99 ($78) per month. It will provide you with a server that has a single processor with 4 CPU cores @ 3.1 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, 1 TB storage space (RAID – 1) along with unmetered bandwidth, 3 dedicated IP addresses and a 1-year SSL certificate. You can go all the way up to the Ultimate plan which costs £104.99 ($146) per month. It will provide you with a single processor with 4 CPU cores @ 3.1 GHz, 32 GB of RAM, 2 TB of storage space (RAID-1), along with unlimited bandwidth, 3 dedicated IP addresses and a 1-year SSL certificate. In short, only the amount of memory and the amount of storage space you have will be increased with each subscription.

Conclusion

If you are looking for something truly reliable that will serve as a foundation for your business and don’t mind spending some big bucks on it, dedicated hosting is definitely for you. Just make sure that you’re choosing a trustworthy company. Even though I’ve found all of these hosting companies to be good enough, only two are the best in my opinion. If you want something truly reliable both in terms of hardware and in support, you should go for Liquid Web or InMotion. They have a history of reliability and go the extra miles to ensure their clients have the best possible experience.

I hope you have enjoyed reading through this article and that we helped you learn something new today!