Aplus.net Blog

As we’ve been discussing this past week, if you’re just beginning your online business journey, shared hosting is a good way to get started on a modest scale.

But if you have expectations of significant site traffic at an early stage, or if you need advanced features like high-definition video hosting, you’ll want to take a serious look at the benefits you can only get from dedicated hosting.

With shared hosting, your bandwidth and storage is limited by other users on your server. If you’re unfortunate, you may even have to “share” server space with a company that uses a lot of resources (a common occurrence, given the offering of “unlimited” bandwidth by many providers these days, a topic we expored earlier this week). And that can slow your server down considerably.

The goal of every online business is to get popular, and to get lots of traffic — whether to sell more products, or to get more ad revenue, or both. Ironically, it often happens that, just when a website breaks through and gets really popular, it can suddenly stall under the weight of all that new traffic. Where hundreds or dozens of visitors once checked out your site every day, that number is now in the thousands. And shared hosting plans are often not up to the task of handling all this traffic.

So, just when your Internet business needs it the most, your shared hosting plan may very possibly fall short. This has even happened to big companies; just ask the many Microsoft Live Cashback users who feel cheated by Microsoft’s Black Friday blackout.

Dedicated hosting can help to eliminate those problems, by giving you the space and power you need to grow.  You get much larger amounts of bandwidth and data transfer capacity, a must for hosting a highly trafficked site. You get the server to yourself, without sharing. Your server has its own port. It is wholly yours.

Dedicated hosting may cost a little more, but it’s a worthwhile investment for those dedicated to achieving online success. And it’s an essential component when hosting a site that’s focused on media, a topic that we’ll discuss in more detail tomorrow.