The World Wide Web is an amazing thing; with just a computer and an internet connection, you have access to millions of websites and all of the information and entertainment they have to offer. Unlike resources in the real world, these sites never close and can be visited any time of day or night, any time of the year. Websites are available at all times because these sites are hosted on web servers; computers which are designed to stay up and running and connected to the net at all times. Since your home computer isnt really made for the job, you’ll need to purchase web hosting services to get your site up and running.

Web hosting providers offer paid plans that keep your website up and running far better than the free ones provided. If you notice, most sites love to offer the cheapest plan because those plans are great for starters. But if you decide and check out the other packages available, you might see some dedicated web hosting plans.

A dedicated web hosting plan has nearly the same specifications as the shared plan, but the site is stored in its own dedicated server. A dedicated server should be your choice if the following are all true.

You Need Your Site To Be Safe

To make sure that your website is safe, you need to make sure that your database is protected with strong passwords and that any web applications you use are of the latest version to avoid serious exploits. But even if your website is well protected and your site is hosted on a cheaper shared server, you can still feel the impact of any attacks that are made to other sites that are hosted on the same server. But if you have your own dedicated server, there should be nothing to worry about if you keep your site secure because your site is the only one occupying the server.

You dont want your visitors to experience slowdowns

When traffic accumulates in a single website, the performance isnt affected all that much if the server specifications are high. But once you have lots of websites stored in that server and all the websites get large amounts of traffic, all visitors will suffer from slower speeds. This may not be very noticeable for simple page loading, but if your site has lots of multimedia content, slowdowns can occur and may frustrate your visitors. With a dedicated server, all of the servers resources are for your website ensuring maximum performance even during heavy traffic periods.

You want full control of the server

Even shared web hosting lets you control what you upload to your site, the applications you use and the privileges for these applications and content. There is more to web hosting than this though; if you need to change VPS settings and set root privileges to allow several different people to manage your site, then you’ll want to use a dedicated server. Especially if your website is for business, then you’ll have an easier time running your website using a dedicated server.

If not all of these three conditions hold true for your website, then you can probably keep using shared hosting for the time being. Shared hosting is great for your site when it’s just getting started but as your site and your online business presence grow, you’ll need the control, the performance and the security which a dedicated server provides.