5 Great Advantages to Hosting on a Managed, Dedicated Server
26 02 2008
When I moved almost all of my websites to a dedicated server at LiquidWeb about 4 months ago, I thought I would be getting some peace of mind, but I had no idea about all of the other great things that would result from having a managed, dedicated server of my own.Here are some of the things I find really advantageous about dedicated servers as opposed to typical shared hosting that I was handcuffed by before.
- Incredible Response Times - granted these differences are in milliseconds, but obviously there is a significant difference here. These two charts are my site monitoring results from my dedicated server at LiquidWeb, and my Gridserver (shared hosting) account at Media Temple. If you look at the scale on the left, you will see that the LiquidWeb dedicated server is about twice as fast on average. I should also mention that the Media Temple account has regular unscheduled downtime, still to this day.
LiquidWeb Dedicated Server:
MediaTemple Gridserver:
- Great Tech Support - I always get a knowledgeable tech on the phone within a minute or two of calling. I’ve never had to wait on hold for longer than two minutes ~ever~ and in the beginning, I had to call quite a bit. While I don’t have experience with LiquidWeb’s shared hosting, I can honestly say that as a dedicated server customer, you get treated with a lot of respect and get premium service. I never had that feeling in all the years I used shared hosting.
- Ability to Customize Server Configurations - One of the most frustating things I had to deal with on shared hosting was the fact that the shared hosting companies had many different restrictions regarding what could be run on their servers, and settings they allowed. Aplus.net was particulary bad about this…I had to submit a support request every time I wanted a site to download an RSS feed from another location, they restricted the number of simultaneous PHP processes, causing all kinds of errors. With my dedicated server, I can change just about any configurable service I want and do some neat things I couldn’t do before like using PHP code in .htm pages.
- More Control Over Email Functionality - With shared hosting you get email in a can, but with a dedicated server, you get a first class butler saying, “sir, what outgoing port would you like to use for your pop3 connection?” Many different aspects of email service are configurable through CPanel, much more so than what you’re probably used to with shared hosting.
- Ease of Adding / Removing Accounts & Static IP’s - It’s never been easier to add or remove new websites to my account. Who knows how many this server will actually let me add? Another great advantage is that I can get static IP addresses for all of my sites. From an SEO standpoint, static IP’s are a plus, and I had no idea that I could even get static IP’s from different class-C blocks hosted on the same server - another great advantage.
While I was somewhat reluctant about moving my sites over to a dedicated server for quite some time, I can look back with confidence now knowing that it was one of the best decisions I’ve made as a website owner. The price was quite a bit higher than what I was used to paying, but the peace of mind, service, and flexibility all make up for it. The bottom line is that my websites are a significant source of income for me, and what is more important to a website than hosting? When hosting fails, everything fails - your whole business.
Can I ask which dedicated server package you’re using with LiquidWeb?
I think I’m just using the webmaster series, but I added a few upgrades, like RAM and a different RAID configuration.