Taking your business online stopped being optional for most businesses, courtesy of the Covid pandemic. For many business owners, that meant a mad rush to learn as much as possible, as fast as possible, about online business. One of the cornerstones of taking your business online is web hosting.
Hosting comes in a lot of flavors, which shared hosting often proving the go-to choice for businesses new online. If you’ve been online for a while and see traffic increase, though, you need more robust options. That’s when you learn about dedicated servers and unmetered dedicated servers.
Not clear on what those terms mean or why it matters? Keep reading for an introductory guide to unmetered dedicated servers.
What Are Dedicated Servers?
A shared hosting service puts a lot of websites onto one server. Each site shares the available server resources. That can degrade performance on your site if another site sees a big spike in traffic.
With a dedicated server, your site effectively gets all of the resources of a single server. For more on dedicated servers, take a look here.
Types of Dedicated Servers
Discussions around dedicated servers usually revolve around web hosting servers. Other types of dedicated servers include file servers, print servers, game servers, and email servers. There are also metered and unmetered dedicated servers, which we’ll cover next.
What Is an Unmetered Dedicated Server?
For dedicated web servers, there are two main approaches taken by hosting services. You have metered dedicated and unmetered dedicated servers.
With metered dedicated servers, you get a fixed amount of bandwidth for your website every month. That means there is a hard limit on how much data can move to and from your website. With unmetered dedicated servers, your site doesn’t get that hard limit.
Benefits of an Unmetered Dedicated Server?
One immediate advantage for most businesses with unmetered dedicated servers is an immediate and ongoing improvement in site performance. You also bypass overage fees. Unmetered servers let you scale up your online service offerings more easily since you don’t worry about reducing bandwidth elsewhere.
Disadvantages of Unmetered Dedicated Servers
The main drawback of unmetered dedicated servers is the cost. It’s usually the more expensive option when looking at baseline month-to-month costs.
While unmetered, it’s not unlimited. Your site attaches to a port. That port has a limit to how much bandwidth it can support at any given moment. Under certain traffic conditions, that could still mean a downgrade in performance.
Unmetered Dedicated Servers and You
Taking your business online opens a lot of potential doors for you, but it also means keeping an eye on site performance. If a shared plan doesn’t cut it anymore, you may well need a dedicated server. If you’re seeing rapid traffic growth, you likely need an unmetered dedicated server.
While unmetered dedicated servers do cost more, it’s often an overall cost saving when you factor in the overage fees or downtime you avoid.
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