How to Choose the Best Dedicated Server for your Small Businesses Monday, November 30, -0001

If you are hoping to invest in the best-dedicated server hosting provider, you need to consider several important factors. Having a dedicated server is a surefire way to ensure that your website is reliable and optimal. However, choosing the best-dedicated server can be one of the most challenging decisions for any business.

With a dedicated server, you don’t have to worry about website crashes or loading speeds. However, choosing a dedicated server can be one of the most challenging decisions for a small business.

Why is the dedicated server the best choice? 

Dedicated hosting is a great choice for small to large businesses. In dedicated hosting, an entire remote server is rented exclusively for an enterprise’s own use. This means that the enterprise will be entitled to having unlimited disk space, bandwidth and memory.

There are several benefits of using a dedicated server. One of these is having your own unique IP address. You get to enjoy its security since no one else has the access to your server. Unlike having a shared server, you don't have to share the same IP address among multiple users. There are instances wherein having a shared server, which entails sharing the same IP address, results in different issues. For example, your site can be affected in terms of web ranking if one of the websites that share your IP address gets blacklisted. Having your own IP address can prevent this from occurring.

There are several other advantages of using a dedicated server such as a high degree of scalability, flexibility, and reliability. This explains why many businesses around the world choose the best-dedicated server hosting for their sites. 

Choosing the Best Dedicated Server

When it comes to choosing the dedicated server, there are several important aspects that you need to take into consideration. Remember that choosing the dedicated server provider is just as important as finding the right server to lease. No two providers are the same and what they offer in terms of dedicated server packages vary greatly. It’s important that you not only ensure that your provider offers the servers and resources you need, but also that the server is being housed in a safe facility. You don’t want to find yourself leasing a server from someone’s makeshift garage or data center. Some of the important things to look for in a dedicated server hosting data center include:  

• Reliability – Your uptime can determine whether you will have seconds of downtime or days. Your data center should be able to guarantee a certain uptime through SLA. Reliability can be provided through network and energy redundancy, as well as security measures.

• Flexibility – It’s inevitable, your company will continue to grow. Even though that is a good thing, if your company is equipped to handle the additional customers, your server may not be. This is why it’s important for you to check with your data center whether or not you have the ability to increase your resources to accommodate your growing business. A dedicated server should allow for scalability by providing the option to customize your applications, increase disk space or bandwidth and upgrade your hard drive as needed.

• High Availability - What is the impact of downtime on your business? With a dedicated server, you know that you are not sharing resources with anyone else. With a single point of failure in one server, it is important to decide if you are able to accept the possibility of downtime, or if you want to scale multiple dedicated servers to run High Availability (HA). HA means that in the event of a failure, such as a hardware fault, a website will operate continuously without error. To set up, you need to run a minimum of two servers, but to achieve top performance, we recommend that you run four. Two servers will be dedicated to your web/ application traffic, and two will be dedicated to your database with a failover set up between them, creating no single point of failure architecture. For businesses with high-profile websites that encounter large numbers of traffic, having high availability is a necessity. Downtime can damage a business’s reputation as well as having financial repercussions, so it is critical to avoid any disruption to normal service.

• Security – When hiring a data center for dedicated server hosting be sure to ask about their firewalls, security protocols, and preventive measures for virus attacks and malicious websites. And if possible see for yourself, how secure the facility is. Also, ask your data center associate if they offer firewalls for your server. An ideal dedicated server has multiple checkpoints, biometrics authentication, locked cages, and combination lock lockers. This ensures that no unauthorized person will have access to your data or your server.

• Operating System - There are essentially two choices for server operating systems: Windows or Linux. Windows licensing fees will cost you more to run it on your server; Linux is by far the most popular choice, running on around 80% of the world’s web servers. While Linux dedicated hosting is relatively cheaper because it is an open-source platform, Windows dedicated hosting becomes essential when your site runs applications like ASP and ASP.NET. Linux has a stronger reputation for its speed and reliability, but Windows is known for its power and flexibility. If your site uses PHP and Perl, Linux is the obvious choice of an operating system.

• Amount of Bandwidth - If you are expecting a huge amount of traffic on your website, you need more bandwidth. The bandwidth basically controls the amount of data that can be transferred using the server, typically for a month. And if you are planning to have HD pictures, stream multimedia files, or run complicated scripts—you should look into getting a server with even higher bandwidth. A graphic-heavy website or a multimedia site will obviously need higher bandwidth than a regular blog website or a brochure site. 

• Quality of support - For businesses that go down the managed route, the cost and accessibility of support are vitally important factors to consider - but so, too, is the quality of that support. There’s a lot of value in having a direct line of communication with senior technical staff, and even more so if they take the time to understand your business and your unique requirements, so be sure to ask your provider about the setup they have and who’ll be on hand to answer the phone or pick up support tickets.

Using these factors will ensure that you’re making the right decision which will pay off in the long run. Do your own research to get an understanding of what your business needs. There are endless benefits to having a dedicated server, but you also have to keep in mind the value for money they offer.

If you have any questions about choosing a dedicated server for your business, contact us today. Our team of experts can help you and answer any questions you may have regarding having your own dedicated server.