The World Wide Web has brought with it some of the most amazing technological advances ever seen by a single generation. Just ten years ago, it was considered “cutting edge” for a company to simply have it’s own website, never mind an interactive page with high-tech graphics and shopping carts. But now if a business doesn’t have its own site, they are considered to be archaic by the majority of net surfers. But with all of these advances come some issues, especially for those companies and businesses that require larger or heavily visited sites. For this and other reasons, dedicated servers and managed hosting has become quite popular in the more recent years of the Internet.

Simply put, a dedicated server refers to the manner in which Web hosting is done. A shared Web hosting company may have several different companies’ websites on one of their “on-premises” computers, all running at the same time. But larger companies (with the websites to match), maybe with a forum or need for a lot of storage, are much better off with their own computer from a Web hosting company. This is what a dedicated server is- one computer from a Web hosting company that is “dedicated” to the needs of one website. Not only does such a server save the client network administration fees and overall costs, client router, Internet connection and security system, but also can usually be fully operated by you, the client.

Once you’ve decided that the best interest of your business and website includes a dedicated server, you need to decide on a Web host. The computer that holds all of your website’s information (the html, graphics, etc.) is your (managed) web host, which may be either dedicated to you or not, as described above). You pay the web hosting company a fee to keep all of your site’s information.