Benefits of Semi-Dedicated Server Hosting

There are two primary modes of web development: frontend and backend development. A frontend developer would be concerned about the look and feel of websites, whereas a backend developer would be concerned about how data is accessed, processed, and modified, as well as how the website runs. A lot of businesses invest more money in the former, in hopes that beautiful web design would cause higher traffic.

The problem with investing too much resources in frontend development and too little resources in backend development is that while your website can rake in a huge number of visitors, your servers may not be able to handle the traffic, eventually slowing down to a point that visitors no longer enjoy navigating through your site. Blogs and other sites need to be able to store huge amounts of data, like high-resolution background images, videos, and other types of multimedia content people expect from modern websites.

A lot of novice website owners go for shared web hosting plans simply because shared web hosting services are the cheapest types of hosting services available. Unfortunately, though, a lot of shared web hosting plans offer very limited hardware resources and are often only viable for websites expecting very little traffic. Going this route also means that your site will more than likely be limited to textual content as well. Webmasters often advise going for virtual private server (VPS) hosting or setting up your own dedicated server for better control and power. This may not be a viable option if you don’t want to do system backups and maintenance yourself. These options also tend to be rather expensive. Fortunately there’s a different player in the field that presents a balance of speed and affordability: semi-dedicated server hosting.

What is a Semi-Dedicated Server?

A semi-dedicated server is becoming a popular choice among people who handle medium traffic websites. Straddling the line between shared web hosting and VPS hosting, semi-dedicated servers can provide more CPU power and RAM without relinquishing the convenience of having a centralized system administrator. Semi-dedicated servers achieve this balance of convenience and power by housing less websites than a shared web hosting server, therefore splitting the server resources among fewer websites.

Benefits of Switching to a Semi-Dedicated Server

A lot of people switch to semi-dedicated servers after their user traffic has reached the ceiling of their shared web host plan. Some people, however, go straight into semi-dedicated servers without going through shared web host services. Nevertheless, you’ll want to check out these points to see if you’re ready to make the jump to semi-dedicated server hosting:

Fewer Users Per Server: a common problem shared web hosting clients experience is the sudden drop in performance when a site experiences a large amount of user traffic. This means that even if your site’s data is well within its size limit, clients who abuse their bandwidth and memory allocation may potentially cause all the sites sharing the same server to slow down to a crawl. In semi-dedicated servers, you share a server with much less people, therefore being less prone to these uneventful slowdowns.

Ease-of-use: a semi-dedicated server allows you to manage your site easily through a simple GUI-based interface. While power users may not enjoy this level of convenience that comes at the expense of customizability, this type of control is just what bloggers and other simple website owners need to get their sites up and running in no time; no fiddling with backup software, updating software and hardware components, and mundane maintenance tasks. It’s all taken care of by the system administrator.

More CPU Power and Memory: because you share resources with fewer websites, you can load richer multimedia content and get heavier site traffic without having to worry about slowing down the server.

More Frequent Backups: backups can become tedious to perform, but fortunately backups are automatically done for you with semi-dedicated servers. While shared web hosts do perform backups automatically as well, they’re done less frequently because of the time and space constraints. With semi-dedicated servers, backups are done more frequently since there are fewer sites. This means that in case your site crashes you have more restore points to choose from.

Security: semi-dedicated servers have built-in protection from hackers; therefore you won’t need to worry about installing additional software. Also, because there are fewer sites per server, the chances of a downtime occurring due to breach in security becomes significantly lower than that of shared web hosts.

Low Cost: semi-dedicated servers will be a tad more expensive than shared web hosts because there are fewer people to chip in on the maintenance and upkeep of the server. However, semi-dedicated servers remain significantly cheaper than VPS hosting or dedicated server and are therefore great options for site owners on a budget.

Conclusion

Semi-dedicated server hosting is a great choice for websites that have more user traffic than a shared web host can handle. If you’re looking for a no-nonsense way of hosting your website without sacrificing user traffic and site content, then semi-dedicated server hosting is the way to go; you can’t go wrong with the convenience and power it provides.