If you have a large site which receives a huge volume of traffic, shared hosting might not have the capacity of handling your growth. You’ll need to switch to dedicated hosting so as to serve your customers better. In shared hosting, several websites share the bandwidth and disk space of a single server. On the other hand, dedicated hosting involves renting a whole server for your own exclusive use. If you decide to go for a dedicated hosting plan, make sure the hosting company is reliable and trustworthy. You need a web host who will ensure that your site is up most of the time. Though dedicated hosting is more costly than shared hosting, it gives you the liberty of allocating bandwidth and disk space as you see fit.
There are numerous dedicated web hosting plans available with varying prices. Packages from servers with bigger hard drives and faster processors cost more. Another factor which has an effect on the price is whether the server is managed or unmanaged. Managed hosting is usually more costly compared to unmanaged hosting. A managed hosting service provides the expertise and support to carry out routine maintenance tasks. This kind of service saves you the trouble of hiring your own personnel to maintain your servers.
However, depending on your site’s requirements, basic managed hosting might not be enough. You might need to find a web hosting solution which is capable of running platforms on your behalf. Such providers take not only host your site, but also take care of the platform on your behalf. Some of the hosted solutions include hosted conferencing and IP telephony, hosted email, hosted CRM and hosted collaboration. The hosted platforms could be either dedicated to a single customer, or shared among a number of customers.
If you choose to go for unmanaged hosting, you or your should be able to solve problems on your own. This means having an understanding of the software, protocols and operating system installed in the computer. However, unmanaged hosting does not mean that you are entirely on your own. Most hosting companies continue to offer customer support to a certain extent for their dedicated hosting plans. This includes things such as hardware maintenance, software installation and configuration. You are likely to be charged a fee for this additional support.
The choice between unmanaged and managed hosting is determined by technical needs of your site, as well as your ability to manage a server and keep it operating at peak efficiency. If you have personnel who are capable of carrying out most of the maintenance tasks, an unmanaged server is the best option for you. However, if you would rather leave the job of server maintenance to skilled professionals, go for managed hosting.
Guest article written by: Charles Mburugu often writes about web hosting and online backup. He has also written articles about how to make a website.
I would definitely like to go for Managed Hosting. I feel that the benefits and convenience us more in Managed Hosting than in unmanaged one. With unmanaged hosting, I may save a few bucks but then I will have to be ready for constant problems
I wonder what is the level from which we have to switch to a VPS or to a dedicated server. I think a blog should have more than 10.000 unique visitors a day, to switch to a better hosting plan.
After working on websites for over 6 years I do have to agree with this article. If you have a website which has a lot of traffic then shared hosting isn’t really for you because I learnt the hard way when my site went down after a spike.
I’m now up and running on a managed host and couldn’t be happier :).
Given that my site is still small, unmanaged hosting works for me. But thanks for offering options of what to do when my site hopefully grows larger in size.
You’ve omitted a significant and cost effective half way house (VPS Hosting), but you are right there is a big comfort factor and ease in using Managed Dedicated hosting versus Unamanged Hosting.
Dedicated hosting always a better option when one has the Technical Knowledge and the Financial Backing. Great post – I’m sure there quite a couple of people who will find it useful.
What are minimum requirements for starting a dedicated hosting? I am looking to have my own dedicated server but not sure how to start this.
Hey Charles, this is really a good article on benefits of Managed web hosting and I am sure that now readers will be able to make their choice wisely and in return benefit their business and get more ROI.
Dedicated hosting is the good for site who are receiving large number of the traffic especially for the ecommerce website but to select right company for it is also the very important decision to get beneficial services of it.
My first solution for my e-commerce platform was shared and managed host. Not good for running Magento. I switched to dedicated unmanaged and I’m over the moon. On shared managed host I had to ask for every tweak or add-on. Now I can do everything I want without asking because server is mine 🙂
I wanted to save and went for unmanaged. I regreted it for a week or so… I knew something about linux, so I was sure that I will handle it without any problems. I was wrong… Had to reinstall debian on my server 4 times… Finally I settled my web server and it runs just fine, but if you’re not familiar with linux – avoid unmanaged.