A dedicated server is a powerful computer set up to work specifically for your business needs. It’s essential to know the signs indicating it’s time to upgrade from a shared hosting plan or a virtual private server (VPS) and switch to a dedicated server.
Your website experiences regular downtimes
If you’re experiencing regular downtime, your website is down for more than a few minutes at a time. This can be highly detrimental to your business, as it results in lost revenue and loss of customer satisfaction. Customers visiting your site during these downtimes will see an error message instead of the content they were expecting to find. They may also leave without making any purchases or completing the tasks they originally came for.
If you are experiencing frequent website crashes or slow load times that result in constant downtime, this signals that there could be many issues with your hosting provider. You may need to upgrade to dedicated hosting if you want things like security and uptime guaranteed by professionals.
Your business is growing at a rapid pace
Your business is proliferating, and you are beginning to struggle with scaling your infrastructure. As your business grows, so does the demand for uptime and performance. To keep up with this demand, you need a reliable solution that enables you to grow without worrying about maintenance or downtime. A dedicated server is the best option for scalability, performance, security, reliability, and cost. It also provides flexibility when it comes to adapting based on the changing needs of your company or internal teams as they expand their technology usage.
Your customers are complaining about slow loading times
If you’re noticing a large number of customer complaints about slow loading times, it could be that your site is overloaded with traffic. But it also might mean that there are other issues at play, such as:
- A lack of resources. If your server doesn’t have enough RAM or processing power to handle the volume of traffic, it will take longer for pages to load.
- Lack of bandwidth (the rate at which data is transferred). Your hosting provider may not be able to deliver enough bandwidth to support all those visitors trying to access your website at once.
Whether you need more RAM or more CPU power depends on what kind of workloads are running on your server and how much memory those workloads require—but no matter what the issue is here, upgrading from shared hosting will likely help solve it by giving you access to dedicated hardware designed specifically for web applications.
You are outgrowing your shared hosting plan
Shared hosting is an excellent option for small businesses. It’s relatively inexpensive and quickly lets you get your website online with little technical expertise. Shared hosting also works well for new companies with limited traffic or storage needs.
But if you’re trying to grow a business fast, this might not be the right choice anymore. A shared plan doesn’t offer enough storage space or bandwidth to handle your growing needs—and it’s unlikely that any single shared host will be able to meet those demands either. And if your site relies on custom software (like WordPress) or uses too much CPU power, running it on a shared plan could result in slow load times or even downtime when other sites are hogging all the system resources.
You need to store and access large amounts of data
Dedicated servers are more suitable for storing and accessing large amounts of data. They’re also better equipped to handle the increased demand that comes with rapid growth. This is because dedicated server providers have access to their own fiber optic lines, which allows them to provide more bandwidth and speed than a shared hosting provider can give you.
You require a powerful database
If you heavily use database queries and require a powerful database server that can handle large volumes of data in real-time, then a dedicated server is likely the best solution. A dedicated server provides more resources at once than a shared server and gives you more flexibility for the cost.
A dedicated server also has more storage space than a shared one. Your business won’t have to worry about out-of-disk space issues when uploading content or storing large files on its website or cloud storage service.
You want to install custom software on your server
If you want to install custom software on your server, you should look for a dedicated server. A shared hosting environment will have restrictions on what it can support because it’s running on a single physical machine. This means that many different customers’ sites may be running on the same hardware and software configuration. VPS and cloud hosting providers also have similar limits for what they can support due to their virtualization technology (which creates multiple virtual machines from a single physical device). Services like those provided by Liquid Web offer “fully customizable dedicated server hosting with real-time monitoring and a 100% power and network uptime guarantee.” With these services, you won’t need to worry about the complexities of maintaining and optimizing your server.
While shared hosting plans are great for basic websites, it may be time to upgrade if you want to take your business to the next level. A dedicated server will give you complete control over your website with faster speeds and more resources.
