There are a wealth of benefits to using managed dedicated servers to host your site. A managed dedicated server should always be used as a minimum security requirement for sites that take customer information or carry out financial transactions. Any serious website that is of crucial importance to a company or business should also only be hosted on a dedicated server. With anything less, such as a shared hosting and the necessary level of security is just not present. This article explores all the benefits of managed dedicated servers whilst weighing up the pros and cons of alternative solutions to web hosting.

To start with there is the advantage of your server being in a datacenter. The systems you need to keep your server running, such as power, cooling, internet connectivity and so on, all have backup systems if one or other fail. If you were to try to duplicate this in your own offices, the costs would quickly become prohibitive.

Then there are the managed dedicated servers themselves. Being dedicated, no other person or web master has access to the server. A dedicated server is one where just your own site or sites are hosted. When sites are shared together on a shared server, if one website is hacked then your own is put at risk of the same treatment. Viruses are also easily spread across sites on the same server. There could be a large number of sites hosted on the same server and so multiple administrators or web masters have access to your server. Apart from the security risks involved, sharing bandwidth in this way results in slower upload times for all the sites on the server. With a dedicated server, loading times are much quicker and as research shows you only have about 2 seconds for a site to load before a visitor gives up and clicks elsewhere, speed is extremely important.

If you have managed hosting then you will also reap additional benefits. When you have managed hosting, the company you have chosen will provide all the hardware and cover all the network costs. They are responsible for the upkeep of the data centre the server is placed in and all maintenance tasks associated with your server and network. Constant monitoring will be carried out to ensure that any technical glitch is dealt with quickly and easily.

Not only will visitors be put off with a slow loading website, they are also unlikely to return to any site that is suffering from technical problems. When a website goes down, even for just an hour or two this can have serious consequences. By having managed hosting however you can have peace of mind that down time is not a big risk and so losing customers through technical problems is unlikely to occur.

Although the costs of having managed dedicated servers are greater than having shared hosting, the additional security benefits you receive are greater than this monetary saving. Unless cost is of utmost importance then you should always consider dedicated server hosting first. There is another possibility when it comes to hosting sites, and that is of colocation. This is when space in a data centre is rented and you place your own server into it. However it does mean that you are responsible for the upkeep of the server and the network. Although you don't need to pay to have the data centre created and fitted with all the necessary equipment, you do have to pay for the server itself and you are responsible for all network monitoring too. Most companies or people with just a few sites feel this is unnecessary and choose to have dedicated managed servers instead.

If you have websites then you should consider managed dedicated servers as a way to host your sites. You can find an affordable or even cheap dedicated server and then not only will you have great levels of security but your costs are kept down too. It is possible to have uk colocation if you want to own the hardware you use.