Managed dedicated server hosting is when a third party company hosts your website for you via a dedicated server. That means no other sites are hosted on the same server and it also means the outside company take care of all server costs and maintenance. This is one of the best and most secure ways you can have a website hosted. Hosting is a vital part of having a website, without hosting the site won’t be online in fact. There are different choices available as to how your site is hosted, with benefits and a disadvantages of each. This article explains in more detail what managed dedicated server hosting is and the benefits of it.

Having a dedicated server is crucial if you run an online business, have websites that take payment information or have a website that is of vital importance to your business. On a dedicated server no one but you hosts a website on it. If a server is shared then multiple websites are hosted on the same server and multiple people have access to it. Not only can this make loading times quite slow but your own site could be affected by some other webmaster accessing the server and making alterations to their site. Viruses are even a risk as they can spread to other sites on a shared server. If you are a serious business or have multiple sites then shared server hosting should be avoided at all costs, unless finances are extremely tight. The benefits of having a shared server are financial – it is extremely cheap to host your site this way.

A dedicated server is not as cheap to have, but the security benefits outweigh the higher cost. By choosing managed dedicated server hosting as well as providing the server on which the websites are run, the company providing the service will also take care of maintenance tasks and ensure the server is working well and there are no technical problems through constant monitoring. Having a website go down due to network problems or some other technical hitch can be very problematic, especially if your business depends on the site. It is simply not worth taking any risks and managed dedicated server hosting eliminates those risks.

It is possible to look after your own servers. This of course carries costs and an additional task list. Having a server is more involved than simply owning the hardware, you need a data centre in which it sits. You can rent space in a nearby data centre instead of purchasing the equipment and installing a data centre of your own. This is known as colocation. You would be responsible for all maintenance, monitoring and general technical support.

You may not have considered setting up your own data centre but were instead thinking of a server rack or server cupboard. In an open plan office space, a server rack can be quite noisy and distracting. A server cupboard means the server is out of the way but may not meet the needs of an efficient system. Cooling in a data centre is a major factor, as is a clean power supply. Over heated servers and mains power spikes can severely impact your website and the average office space is not necessarily designed for these benefits. In an office, the internet access equipment, the routers, may also be on standard mains supply and so these too are at risk.