When it comes to running a business, it makes sense to own or have total control of an asset that is important to making your company run. Dedicated hosting allows you to do just that. But is this approach best for you and your business?

Ongoing Management

When talking about dedicated hosting, the first thing that should pop into your head is management. Even if those servers aren’t technically yours and you can’t physically touch them (cause 99% of the time, you can’t), you own them in the fact that anything that happens on them is due to your or someone in your organization’s actions. A dedicated server is yours and only yours. While someone else keeps the power and bandwidth connected to it, only your code operates on it.

A dedicated host can be a single computer all the way to a dedicated cloud solution that is specific to only your code. The key here is that you’re managing what’s happening at all times.

The opposite of a dedicated host is a managed hosting solution. Someone else operates the server, keeps up with maintenance, and puts out fires, while you run your business.

Privacy

A dedicated solution may make more sense for you if you need to be PCI compliant. If you have personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive personal information (SPI) stored on your servers, you want to show clients that you control all aspects of a system.

Internal Resources

A dedicated host also makes sense if you already have an experienced systems administrative staff on your payroll. Since you have the people that can run these types of systems, why not take advantage of that? You get full control to try out new things whenever you want.

Performance

An obvious benefit to a dedicated hosting solution is that you get all the processing and memory to yourself. There is no sharing resources or dealing with a potential noisy neighbor getting a lot of traffic and slowing down your server. The space is yours to do what you want.

Liability

A major issue with dedicated hosting is that the buck stops with you. Beyond power and bandwidth access, everything that happens on that server is up to you. If an update isn’t handled correctly, there’s no one else to call. If your web host, load balancer, or database servers fall over for any reason, the only person to blame is you.

The Alternative to Dedicated Hosting is Managed Hosting

When thinking about hosting, you have to ask yourself if ownership is what you actually need. Sometimes dedicated hosting makes sense and sometimes it might make sense for you to rent assets and let someone else take care of the maintenance. That way, you get the best of both worlds: new equipment and expert maintenance.

Hosting is just like a business owning or leasing a retail space. You can own the server in a dedicated solution and have full control and responsibility, or you can rent/lease a managed solution and give up a little control for reliability. Often the biggest thing to keep in mind is money. A dedicated solution is going to cost more upfront and continue to cost more to maintain. If the payoff is worth the cost, then it makes sense to dedicate yourself.

If you’d rather not bother with maintenance costs, hiring a dedicated staff of individuals to work on your servers, and putting out fires on your own, then managed hosting, like the kind we offer at Pressable, is for you. We take care of the day-to-day busywork of hosting so you can get on with what you do best—growing your business.

Learn more about the managed WordPress hosting solutions Pressable offers.