What do you do when you’ve got created a successful web site, one that’s so successful that your current hosting arrangement simply isn’t up to the task and your hosting company aren’t too happy with you?

It’s a nice dilemma to have, but a dilemma just the same!

When customers begin finding that they cannot get access to your web site for the reason that it’s been taken offline due to high resource usage, or that the response time is glacially slow, they typically give up, visit your competitors website and purchase from them instead.

When that happens it is time to begin exploring dedicated web hosting!

Before you dive straight into dedicated web hosting the first thing you ought to do is to take a realistic study of your existing web business and do a thorough analysis of both your current needs and your projected future requirements. Clearly you’ll be anticipating growth over the approaching years, so make sure that you think about the expected increase in demand when working out your requirements.

You may be wondering why you mustn’t simply opt for a bigger and better shared hosting plan? The problem is that with shared hosting your site is sharing the same hardware resources as numerous other sites, so if those sites are employing a heap of system resources then your site is going to suffer. Do you actually want to be in competition with the other sites on your server for precious resources that you need to keep your website running smoothly? Or would you rather have all of them to yourself, guaranteeing your customers the best experience and ensuring that your site will stay up and running 24/7?

Of course with dedicated hosting there are other benefits, like having way more control over the environment that your website runs in, the power to install and run your own software, and not having to stress about what you use your disk space for.

But whereas a dedicated server might be the best solution for any business that is serious about it’s internet presence it’s not without it’s drawbacks. As an example, there’s the price issue. Historically a dedicated server has been an expensive option that only huge corporations or the successful and profitable businesses might afford. Fortunately that is not the case, and whereas there are still a lot of high-priced dedicated hosting packages on offer there’s also a lot of firms giving cheap dedicated hosting as well.

Maybe the most important downside is that of support. A lot of dedicated server packages provide you with the server and leave you to run it as if the server was in your offices. This means that you are responsible for pretty much every technical aspect of running the server, and if you are not technical then this may be a problem. There are a number of solutions to this problem including recruiting somebody to assist you, or, choosing managed server hosting, where the hosting company will handle technical aspects for you, but typically at an increased price.