Sunday, January 25, 2009

When is a Dedicated Server a Good Idea?

By Ricardo d Argence

Picture this: suppose you want a car, but, you don't have enough money to buy one for yourself, so you go in with four friends and everyone own a piece of the automobile. A schedule would be worked out and everyone would abide by the schedule of when they could use the car.

Now imagine that, at a moment's notice, you were assigned a position that required you to use the car more frequently. However you just had access to the vehicle on limited days at limited times, and the position couldn't wait. Because the car is just as much of your friends car as yours, they are also entitled to use it. In the end, you don't get the position because you aren't able to make use of the car whenever you need it.

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.

You can compare bandwidth with a toll booth. The toll booth allows a certain amount of traffic through at a time on a scheduled basis. Everything turns out okay, until the time that everyone chooses the toll road when they determine they should leave town, all going at the same time. 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.

Although a dedicated server costs more in monthly fees than a shared server, it may end up saving you money if you are losing customers due to the fact that the cannot get access to your website because your server cannot accommodate the traffic. If you have a large or growing business, a dedicated server is the only way to go.

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