Saturday, February 7, 2009

When is a Dedicated Server a Good Idea?

By Ricardo d Argence

Suppose you wanted an automobile and you could not afford to buy one for yourself, so you decided to go in with four friends and everyone would own a piece of the automobile. This meant that although it was cheaper for everyone, they all had to share the car. A schedule would be worked out and everyone would abide by the schedule of when they could use the car.

Now suppose, all of a sudden, you got a job where you needed the automobile a lot more often. But you only had access to the car on certain days at certain times and the job would not wait. Because the car is just as much of your friends car as yours, they are also entitled to use it. You end up losing the job opportunity because you cannot use the car all of the time.

The above is similar to the difference between a business using a dedicated server and a shared server. A dedicated server, just as the name implies, is "dedicated" to serving only your business. This means that you do not have to share space and bandwidth with other online business websites.

If your business is small, you can get by with a shared server, but if you have a very large or blossoming business, then you would find a shared server to be just as distressful as the car analogy that we gave earlier in this writing. Servers have just a set bandwidth amount, which permits just a limited quantity of traffic to enter in a given period of time.

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.

Even though you might be willing to suffer through hours of long lines to get through toll booths when trying to leave town, your customers will not be willing to wait to get into your website just because you do not have enough bandwidth. There's a good chance that if they try to visit your website but can't get through, they'll simply move on, never giving it another try.

After you get customers to your website, the risk of them being turned away because your shared server does not provide enough bandwidth is not worth it. No longer do you have to share space or bandwidth with other bussiness on the server, that this is the main advantage of having a dedicated server. 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.

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