Three Reasons Your Website Should Go Dedicated

There are at least three major reasons your website design company should be on a dedicated server.

1. Shared servers may have hundreds of other websites sharing the same resources.

You don't know how many other websites are on the same server. Many big hosting companies that offer shared servers allow resellers to be on their servers which quickly adds up. If you are planning on having your website updated or created, you may want to find out if your website design company will host your site on a shared or dedicated server.

Many website design companies start out small. They may begin with outsourcing their client's hosting needs, and then move up to leasing space on an existing server with a reseller account. Essentially, they are on a shared server with lots of space and the potential to have lots of clients on their allocated space. The cost of having a reseller's account is quite attractive for the small web design firm. The problem with this is that many such companies do the same thing, and there is the potential for the server to be oversold.

Let's say a reseller has fifty clients and there are twenty resellers on the server. That equals one thousand websites on one server, all trying to use the resources of this one server. The website company may have all the great intentions of ensuring that they provide the best possible support for their clients, but much of their time is swallowed up in trying to manage the support issues that come forth with down time, email that does not work all of the time, and slow website load times.

2. Your IP address could be blacklisted resulting in your website being banned from search engines.

Most websites on shared servers share the same IP address. If one customer on the shared server engages in an email marketing campaign using large bulk lists of emails and a few of the recipients of those emails reports this as spam, there is a good potential that the entire server's IP could get placed on the spam server's lists and get banned from the search engines. This would be devastating for any website domain who wants to be found on the search engines.

3. Security of the server may be compromised.

If your website is on a shared server, resellers of that server space have no control over other resellers or their clients who may have the ability to load scripts that may be at risk to cyber attack. If the server's security is compromised, and it goes down because of a breach of security, your website will also go down and so will all of your hosting reseller's clients.

For the web design firm that has that many clients on their hosting plans there is no reason for them not to switch to a dedicated server. Your clients will love you for it!

Wayne Peters is the CEO of The Creation Studio, a website design company. Visit Wayne's blog at http://www.creationstudio.ca