The Need For Speed: When Is It Time For A Dedicated Server?

April 23, 2010 by Forrest Yingling

If your traffic is picking up or your site seems to have slower page load times than it used to, perhaps you have outgrown your shared, semi-dedicated or VPS hosting account. It just may be time to move up to a dedicated server. A dedicated server is devoted exclusively to one client. Whether it’s time for an upgrade or you are launching a new online business that needs dedicated server capabilities, there are a number of advantages of going the dedicated server route.

Having your own dedicated server eliminates and reduces problems such as:

- Server overcrowding
- A neighbor’s traffic peaks slowing down your site
- Security breeches
- Speed Issues
- Technical Problems

With a dedicated server, your website is guaranteed to be fast and you will avoid many problems. For those involved in e-commerce, speed is a huge issue and can drastically impact your store’s performance. Your page load times can even affect your ranking within the search engines as they are beginning to use site speed as a ranking determinant for their results pages.

Plus, let’s face it – the reason people shop online is to save time. Nobody wants to shop on a slow online store. If your store is slow, customers will quickly move on to your competition. With Dedicated Miva Merchant Hosting, online merchants can easily setup 100% customizable e-commerce and online shopping cart solutions in order to easily sell products online with no downtime and full technical support.

Dedicated Server Hosting also offers greater flexibility with server configuration for sites that have special needs and requirements that can often not be met by the capabilities of shared servers. For example, if a site needs to be PCI Compliant and is on a shared server, the requirements of PCI Compliance can clash with the requirements of other sites on that server, resulting in malfunction and possible downtime. For e-commerce sites requiring compliance with the PCI, PCI Compliant Hosting is a necessity.

Using a dedicated server gives the online business operator more time to focus on the more important issues like – running their business! Having a dedicated server may cost more money but it alleviates a lot of headaches and problems that end up costing money to fix or losing money as a result of downtime or customer frustration.

With a managed dedicated hosting account, all maintenance, updates, security, software patches and repairs of the server are taken care of. This can make a huge difference in the operation of an online business.