Aric Watson asked:




1. Flexibility

A dedicated server gives you control – the flexibility do use the server as you wish. With a shared hosting plan we have to work to be sure that all the clients hosted on a server “play nice” with each other. Not so with a dedicated hosting client – then there’s only you using the server, and we can give you a lot more flexibility to do what you wish!

2. Power

On a shared hosting environment, you have to share the resources of the server with the other hosting clients. While this is fine for a small website, as your website grows in traffic it begins to need greater amounts of bandwidth, disk space, processor time, etc. A dedicated server lets you wring the most use out of the server, since no resources have to be reserved for other clients.

3. Ecommerce

While ecommerce is possible on non-dedicated server, it’s usually a good idea to use a dedicated server for your ecommerce website. This is because with a dedicated server, you have greater security. There are no other clients running websites on your server, only you. Control gives security, and security is always important when doing business online!

4. SEO

SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” is the art of making sure your website is well represented in the search results for search engines like Google and MSN. There are many, many different factors that govern this – and each search engine is different. But one thing that can only help your SEO efforts is to be sure that your website is not located in a “bad neighborhood.” In a shared hosting environment, it’s possible that another client running on the same server as you could be doing something that the search engines don’t like – distributing viruses and malware, posting spam, etc. Because your site is on the same server, it’s possible that the you may be unintentionally affected by the other client’s bad actions. Being on a separate machine and a separate IP address prevents this.

5. Be Prepared

You never know when your site may take off! And while this is definitely a good problem to have, if your site experiences a sudden huge surge of traffic, it’s much easier to ensure that it stays online if you have a dedicated server. Not only can a dedicated server use 100% of it’s resources to deal with a traffic surge, it’s also easier to add more servers to create a server cluster if the original site is on a dedicated server. So plan for the future and be ready for success!