Most website owners use shared hosting and small to medium size businesses use VPS hosting after their needs surpass that the capabilities of basic shared hosting. When someone comes to the point where the site has even outgrown VPS hosting the next step is to go to dedicated server hosting. This hosting involves having your own server dedicated only to your website.
Dedicated servers are great in that they avoid having to share server resources with other sites. With shared hosting you can get a bogged down site that is slow or eventually crashes because there are too many people accessing the server at any given time. Another problem with shared servers is that you will share an IP address. While this may seem harmless you should know that your account could be blocked or flagged in some respects if there has been any questionable activity on the server or by the users of that server. You will be held accountable just because you share the server. With you own server you will know that you don’t have to worry because you are only accountable for you.
For those that have large storage needs and a lot of data transfer or lots of traffic you will benefit greatly from a dedicated server. Not only do you have this luxury but you have choices as far as how much you want to do as far as server management. You can have some hosts do 100% managed hosting. Not only does this mean that the you will have a dedicated server but you will have someone dedicated to managing it full time. Or you can opt for partially managed hosting where the hosting service provides certain features. With partially managed the web hosting service may dictate which aspects they will or will not host. Be sure that these match your needs or see if they are flexible.
If you do not find what you need you may want to go with a company like GoDaddy.com where you can literally build your own dedicated hosting package. Whether you go with this company or others be sure to know and understand who takes care of setting the server up, taking care of hardware, rebooting, maintenance and every other aspect.
Our top picks for Best Dedicated Servers are: