Sunday, February 1, 2009

When is a Dedicated Server a Good Idea?

By Ricardo d Argence

Imagine you wanted an automobile and you could not pay for it, so you decided to go in with four friends and everyone would own a piece of the automobile. While it was cheaper everyone had to share a car. A schedule would be worked out and everyone would abide by the schedule of when they could use the car.

But, if you take a job where you need a car more often this might mean trouble. However you you can only use the car on limited days and at limited times, and the job wouldn't wait. Because the car is just as much of your friends car as yours, they are also entitled to use it. So, you miss out of the chance at employment since you aren't able to use the automobile whenever you need it.

The aforementioned resembles the contrast between a company utilizing a dedicated or a shared server. The definition of a dedicated server is one that is 'dedicated' or committed solely to serving your company.

Shared servers aren't for everyone! A small company may find them very useful; on the other hand, a large business may find them useless! A server can only take in and send out a certain amount of data per second, and it can only permit a finite amount of traffic in and out at any particular moment.

A good way of understanding bandwidth is the analogy of a toll collection booth. The toll booth allows a certain amount of traffic through at a time on a scheduled basis. This is great, until everyone needs to take the same highway out of town, and they all choose the toll road. Then it becomes a disaster as people wait for hours to get through the toll booth.

While you may wait for hours to get through a toll booth if you have to leave town and have no other way to do so, your customers will not wait hours to get to your website if you do not have enough bandwidth. Chances are, that if they try your website once and cannot get on, they will move on never to return again.

In order to pay off your hard work on the website you've been working on for so much time, it's necessary to have the right amount of bandwidth to hold all your clients. One significatn advantage a dedicated server provides is individual service. You do not share space with others. The server is dedicated only to your business, enabling traffic to flow quickly and smoothly.

A dedicated server is more expensive, but the guarantee that your website will allow customers access all the time is worth even more. Your shared server may be costing you customers and money right now. If you have a large or growing business, a dedicated server is the only way to go. - 16039

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