A dedicated server, simply put, is a single server that is used for a single website. When you purchase a typical plan from a web hosting company, what you are actually doing for the most part is purchasing space on one of their servers in order to facilitate the uploading and retrieval of your website. This type of hosting, known as shared server hosting, is the most common type of hosting because people very rarely need their own server if they are in a small time business on their website. However, there are many larger companies with larger websites (not to mention companies that start out small and grow larger) that end up needing lots of space and bandwidth to the point where a whole server is needed to store their material. This is known as dedicated server hosting.
Why Dedicated Servers are Improvements
While it may not be immediately obvious to the average internet user, there is more than just pride involved in you having your own server for your own website. The most obvious factor is space; you get a lot more of it when you have just one website on one server. Additionally, data transfer (the monthly amount of traffic your website can receive) is a lot more in supply for you because of the fact that nobody else is requesting information from that particular server. You also have a larger amount of control of your website, being able to manipulate the server in a way that you would not be able to do if you had other websites on that server to think about. Because of all of these different aspects, dedicated servers are definitely an improvement over shared servers for anyone that wants to use them.
Why Dedicated Servers are not for Everyone
Even though dedicated servers in the absolute sense of the word are better than shared servers, relatively speaking they might not be better for everyone. This is because while a dedicated server is an awesome thing to have, it does not come cheaply and many times represents an investment of over ten times what you might pay for a shared server plan.
About the Author This means that only people that genuinely need the services of a dedicated server should buy one, because while having all that extra space and bandwidth is nice, if you don't use that space and bandwidth you are ultimately just wasting money. For anything else, shared web hosting plans are fine.
