If you are serious about your online business endeavors, you might just consider looking for an online dedicated server. The dedicated server is actually an entire server which is at your disposal, and which is not shared with anybody else.

Right from the start, the advantages are clear: you, as the webmaster, have full control over the server, including option of operating system, hardware, etc. You can customize everything according to your own personal needs, while the administration is still handled by the hosting company.

The most important advantage of using an online dedicated server is that your website performance will not be affected by the traffic of the other websites with which you would have been sharing your server's bandwidth.

The online dedicated server environment provides an exclusive server or servers devoted to the sole purpose of serving yourself only. You do not share hard disk space with other customers, and you avoid shared hosting.

Before dedicated servers existed, a web site developer used to have two hosting options, the low-priced shared hosting model and the premium-priced dedicated server. A person who bought space on a shared host would get a certain amount of disk space and monthly transfer, and would have the web site served from a common web server.

The hosting company would attempt to provide a wide range of options for the web site developer, in order to increase the popularity of their products. But, for example, if a customer needed a non-standard program installed or maybe wanted to use a privileged account in order for a particular utility to run, he would be completely not allowed to achieve these goals.

A simple example might be a site which required a database to store the information in. Many hosting companies provide the standard MySQL database to use on their servers. If your application requires another type of database though, then it could prove to be incompatible with the shared hosting account.

And a dedicated server can be customized anyway you want. But, there's also a catch. Because it can handle much more traffic than a shared hosting account, their much better performance doesn't come cheap. A typical dedicated server can cost the savvy webmaster hundreds of dollars per month depending on its size, network connectivity and the amount of management required from the hosting company.

Webmasters who don't fit into the standard shared hosting model and find that it doesn't work anymore for them, or whose sites grew very popular and required a large amount of resources have the alternative of a dedicated server. It can be customized to exactly fit the needs of you as a site developer. And as long as your business is very successful, you are probably way better with a dedicated server at your disposal.