Servers and Dedicated Servers
Servers and dedicated servers explained in non-techie terms that you can easily understand before choosing your web hosting service.
In order to understand what a managed dedicated server is, you should know what a server, and then a dedicated server is. For those of us who aren’t computer geeks and already know all the techie language and terms, a server sounds like someone who brings us our lunch at the local café. A server does in fact bring us something, but we don’t have to leave it a tip.
Servers
A server is a device that looks similar to your personal computer. This device connects to the internet, and connects anyone who is connected to it to the internet. The server you use is not necessarily in your home, although some high tech sorts choose to house their own personal servers. The server is kept at a remote location and you are connected to it through a device called a modem.
Now, if you have your own website, you are using a hosting server. This server connects your site to the internet so that others on the internet can see it. Hosting servers can be free or they can be paid for. Free hosting servers are typically paid for by advertisements that will show up on your website. The advertisements can be horrible for a website that needs to look professional, or they can be just plain annoying for people who are looking at your site. Alternatively you can choose to pay for your host server and get your website on the internet ad free.
Dedicated Servers
You can share a web hosting server with many other people who also have their websites on the internet through that same server. This is fine if all of the websites on the same server are small and don’t use up a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth is the rate at which your data transfers over the internet. The more people who are visiting your site, or the sites of others, are using up the server’s bandwidth, and essentially slowing down the other sites on the server.
A dedicated server is one that only your site is using. You are not sharing it with any other website, and therefore you have your own bandwidth and you are able to handle more web pages and much more web traffic than you would have been able to handle using a shared server.
Managed Dedicated Servers
Once you have chosen a dedicated server and put your site on the internet, you will need to know if the site is up and running at all times. You will also need to know how to update your software on the server as needed, how to secure your website through the server, and how to back up your information. There is nothing worse than a server crash when you have pending orders on your website and the server has not been backed up to save those orders. It could be detrimental to your business.
A managed dedicated server is a service in which your servers are fully or partially managed by the professionals who offer the hosting service. You don’t have to worry about all of those things that can happen to your site by the fault of the server because there is someone who knows what they are doing managing the server for you. With a managed dedicated server you will save the time you would be spending managing your server issues and spend that time running your business and relaxing.