To receive a lot of traffic means also to be able to handle it. The performance of your site, especially in this regard, depends heavily on the hosting service that it uses. Dedicated hosting is the most powerful of the possible hosting services, so it should be the ultimate option you will choose when looking for an efficient hosting solution for your website. In this article we are going to have a look at how dedicated server hosting will boost the traffic of your website, increasing its speed and the overall performance.
How dedicated hosting works
To host a website the first thing you need is a server. A server is the physical hardware similar to a PC but aimed at uninterrupted operation to provide the uptime of websites of the hosting provider clients.
Basically, all the variants of hosting differ in the way they use the resources of the server. The server can be divided, and shared by different users – here we will have shared hosting or VPS hosting, or it can be dedicated to just one user – thus we get the dedicated hosting.
It’s only natural, that among possible solutions this one is the most powerful – you don’t share the capacities of the server with anybody else; but also the most expensive one, as the payment is completely up to you.
That’s why it doesn’t make much sense to purchase a dedicated server if your needs can be covered by a single dedicated server multiple times. So, in the following, we are going to have a look at some aspects that may help you understand, when it’s time to switch to a dedicated server.
How to understand that your website needs a dedicated server?
It’s common and normal that a vast majority of businesses start with more economic hosting solutions like shared hosting or VPS. The required performance of the site relies heavily on the traffic, so if the site hasn’t acquired many thousands of regular visitors so far, it won’t really need a dedicated server to handle the data of all clients and cope with high traffic peaks. But for any successful business growth is just a matter of time; so is the switching to a dedicated server. But to recognize the right moment, you’ve got to know how a website needing a dedicated server conducts. Let’s have a look at some signs that will help you reveal it.
- Decreased speed. The most obvious way to understand that it’s time to switch to something more powerful is the reduction of the page load speed of the site connected with the high traffic peaks it experiences. It is something that has to be taken seriously, as on the comfort your users experience when using your site, depends whether they will want to come to visit it again. This also affects directly the search engine optimization of your site, which means that the speed is responsible not only for the “natural regulation” of the website users’ number but also for their chance to find you through search engines. So, if the resources are not enough, your website may experience reduced speed or even crash, which won’t be fine anyway.
Of course, the VPS hosting provides flexible rescaling options, but sooner or later even the most powerful VPS won’t be able to cover all of your needs. In this case, the only option remaining will be a dedicated server. - Not enough RAM. A big amount of the site users at a time means that a lot of pieces of the data stored on it are retrieved simultaneously. All these operations need RAM, and if there is not enough of it, the performance of the site will again suffer.
- More bandwidth is required. To put it simply, the bandwidth defines the amount of data that can be transferred simultaneously. For example, if ten users retrieve a file 10 MB in size at a time, then the transfer engaged will be 100 MB. So, knowing approximately, how many people visit your site regularly and how much data they retrieve a day, you can calculate the amount of bandwidth required by your site. If this number exceeds the amount that can be offered by any hosting service but a dedicated server, it’s definitely the time to switch.
- Backup and the security of your data. Sooner or later any hardware runs the risk of breaking. If this happens to the hardware responsible for storing the data, that is with the drive, the data is lost. To avoid it, you need several drives for the backup of your data. Dedicated hosting is the hosting that provides you with the biggest amounts of storage, so you can configure them in RAID-1 (Redundant Array of Independent Drives). In this way, all the data on your site will be registered twice and you won’t have to worry about losing it.
Conclusion
Popular websites need powerful hosting solutions. That’s why, when your site starts dealing with big amounts of traffic and big amounts of data, it’s probably the time to switch to dedicated hosting. We hope that this article helped you understand, how you can increase the traffic towards your website with the help of dedicated hosting and learn how to recognize when your website needs such an upgrade. If it is already the case, make sure to check HostZealot’s UK Dedicated Server. Take care!
