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Introduction to Dedicated Servers 2024 Edition

No matter what kind of business you’re trying to run nowadays, chances are that you will be heavily reliant on a website if you want success. Since almost everything is being done through the internet nowadays, operating a fully-functional website is something that is an absolute necessity, rather than a luxury.

Things aren’t as black and white when it comes to the more technical stuff of running your own website, so if you are currently in the process of making one, it is pretty advisable to read until the end and get as informed as you can on this topic.

Why is running a website important for business?

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All of the promoting, advertising and even shopping is done on the internet nowadays. Let’s say that you’re running a barbershop. Sure, this is probably the type of business that needs a website the least compared to other types, but it still needs one. Here’s why.

You can have the best service in the entire city, but if people are not really aware of it, they will still go to the other less-quality barbershop that has better marketing. Why? Because they never heard of your shop’s existence.

A website is crucial both for transparently displaying your services, prices, and occasional special offers, as well as advertising and showing professionalism in general. A business that has a website is automatically considered to be more serious than the one without any online presence.

Now that you know about the importance of using the internet to your advantage, let’s take a look at some of the more “technical” things that you should pay attention to.

How can I run a website?

In order to run your own website, there are a few things that you need to do. First, you need to think of a unique name and a logo that matches your service. After that, you need to hire a web designer to make the visual look of your website, or you can use finished templates from WordPress for example. After you’re done with all this, you need to find a host with a dedicated server, and this is exactly what we’re here to talk about today.

What is a website host?

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A website host is someone who can “power up” your website in order for it to be live and accessible by other users. There are numerous website hosts on the market nowadays, so choosing the right one might sometimes be pretty complicated if you’re new in all this. A website host is responsible for the load times of your site, as well as the uptime, which is basically how long your website will be accessible before it goes down for a while.

What are the shared servers?

Depending on what kind of package you’re going to choose from your website host, you’ll either get a shared server or a dedicated one. A shared server means that you will have to share resources with other websites, which is never a good choice if you want to take the most professional approach in this.

Sharing resources means less space for content, less space for backup and slightly lowered load-times as well as some other possible issues along the way. The only good thing about it is that it costs less than dedicated servers.

What is a dedicated server?

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According to https://cherryservers.com, choosing to go with a dedicated server is the best option if you want your website to be up and running at all times. A dedicated server is pretty self-explanatory by its name. It means that the server is dedicated to your website only, and you are not going to share any resources or performance with other websites.

What are the pros of this?

  • Increased space for backups and content in general

Since you’re not sharing the memory with any other users, you have more space to customize and backup your website whenever you want. This is not possible if you are sharing with a few other websites, so that’s already a huge advantage right off the bat.

  • Better performance

Imagine opening 10 different programs on your computer. They will all have to share the resources from your RAM and CPU, and none of them will run properly. The same things happen with websites when you’re sharing resources. However, if you run just one program on your PC, all of the resources will be dedicated to it and it will run smoothly. The same thing happens with your website when you’re not sharing, pretty simple.

  • Most of them run on SSD’s

Some companies are really taking things to the next level, so their entire servers are running on solid-state-drives instead of the old-school hard-disk-drives. As we all know already, SSD drives are a lot faster than HDD’s, but these are not usually included in those offers where you’re sharing a server.

  • You get to customize all you want

When you’re sharing a server with another website, or a few others, you are not really free to install all kinds of plug-ins, software and all of those tweaks that you would like to do. This is because you are limited on space, and you cannot risk messing something up for others when you’re installing 3rd party software.

When you have your own server, however, you are free to do whatever you want, and you can tweak things all you want because space is just for you, and you are not risking messing up anything for anyone. Plus, you get to have many backups so experimenting is completely risk-free.

So, where’s the catch?

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Well, using a dedicated server will usually cost you some more money compared to the other option, so if you are completely new in running a website, maybe you would like to start off with the cheaper one at first, and then upgrade if you really feel a need.

All famous and successful brands nowadays are running their website on a dedicated server, so if you really want to have a website that never goes down and is ultra-fast, there isn’t any other option.

About Emmanuel Sanson