Loading...Dedicated servers are often thought of as expensive but best hosting alternatives, available only to those who can shell out around $170 per month to keep their site up. But what is the justification for this hefty price tag? Is it really worth all the money that you are spending for your site?
It really depends on what you need for your site – if you anticipate a huge amount of traffic for the pages of your web service and hence need a big machine to back it all up. Don’t think that just because you are an online retailer (and not a file sharing site), that you don’t need dedicated server hosting.
Here are the top three reasons why we think a serious online retailer would benefit from a dedicated server package.
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In dedicated hosting, stability is assured
The number one quality when it comes to dedicated servers is that it is a lot more stable in terms of speed of connection and availability of resources, compared to shared hosting. Of course, this still depends on how you set it up but think of it this way – the resources of this machine is all up to your disposal, compared to having to compete for bandwidth in a shared hosting setup.
You can control how much of the server is dedicated for the displaying of the image, the billing of your users, how secure it can be etc. In the online retail world, availability of the site whenever you need it is key, so that your customers can understand that your site is reliable and can be a good source of products.
This also assures that there are no outages whenever you experience a huge amount of traffic – making sure that billing is seamless and that they won’t be charged erroneously.
Scaling for a huge customer base is available in dedicated hosting
Another perk of going dedicated server is that you can easily scale your service to be made available for thousands of users. During a typical online buying scenario, users will login, view multiple products and then check out with the items. You have to make sure that there are no hiccups throughout the process, regardless if there is just one online user or 100,000.
Price is outweighed by advantages of dedicated hosting
In any business, the reputation of being reliable is difficult to build and takes time to accumulate. The price of maintaining a dedicated server is really costly since you will not immediately get back your capital once you launch. It takes time for you to become recognized by your target market. But when this happens and you are able to maintain consistency across all of your users, then you are in good hands. It is difficult to pry off loyal customers to a brand that they like.
The reasons above are the biggest reasons why a shared hosting service just won’t do, especially if you are thinking of going big. You can also think of virtual private servers or cloud hosting, so that you only need to pay for what you actually use. But this requires more forward planning and sometimes, it still comes out cheaper to have a dedicated server at your disposal.