It is a known fact that webhosting industry can be pretty overwhelming at times. With advancement in technology and growing competition, hosting providers have been continuously introducing cheaper and cheaper plans to suit the requirements and budget of various firms. This has led to prevalence of a wide variety of hosting plans in the market, making it rather tough to find out what plan is best suited for your website. Today there are basically three different types of hosting options available in the market: shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting, with an extensive variety of sub-plans under all these hosting options. 

This gives modern businesses plenty of option to migrate large portions of their infrastructure to off-site hosts. However, the availability of multiple hosting options can often prove to be overwhelming for firms and they may not know where to start. It is therefore of utmost importance that organizations know about variety of hosting options that are available, and also the one that will suit them the best.

This article focuses on one type of hosting-dedicated server hosting. Recently dedicated server hosting has been under scrutiny, surrounded by a considerable amount of hype and negativity. We’ll try to find out their important features and benefits, but more importantly the myths and misconceptions surrounding this type of advanced hosting. 

Dedicated hosting offers less control than actually desired

One major misconception about dedicated server hosting is that it takes away control from the hands of a client to a considerable extent. A service provider looking after your server often curtails the accessibility and control you would otherwise have liked to have on your machine. 

“Potential disadvantage to dedicated hosting is that you do not have physical access to the server,” The Web Hosting Directory noted. “Your Web-hosting provider will be responsible for maintaining the actual server. They will provide security measures to protect your server and data.” 

This may sound as some type or form of grave warning, but on closer scrutiny you will realise that the perceived threat is blown out of proportion. After all you will agree that it is a good and not a bad thing to let knowledgeable experts take proper care of your server security and maintenance. And as for the statement that it restricts physical access to the server, it is a well-propagated myth rather than anything else. Access and control are two things that are largely dependent upon the service provider you have hired and the type of service you have chosen. For example, a managed dedicated server hosting comes with full range of vendor support. This, however, in no way takes away the control from the firm as they still have complete control of resource usage as well as the platforms, applications or solutions hosted there. Apart from management and accessibility aspects, another good thing about dedicated server hosting is that it frees the internal IT team of the client to put their attention and capabilities on other important matters. 

Dedicated hosting is not as reliable as initially thought

This is another major misconception doing the rounds these days. It is important to mention at the very outset that not only dedicated hosting is more reliable, but dedicated hosting plans offered by quality service providers offer an unprecedented level of quality support. We all know that in a dedicated server hosting, the entire resources and capabilities of a single physical server is reserved for a single website or client. As the resources are exclusively reserved for a single user, clients unlike shared hosting always have access to the support they need. This exclusivity assumes added significance for organizations that host critical real applications and customer facing problems. Without it, employees will be devoid of a platform that allows them to leverage their potential to the maximum and be more productive. Customers too will feel short changed as the resources needed to connect with the business may not be available. 

There is another misconception or you may myth about dedicated servers being inherently less redundant than cloud servers. This is a fact that cloud hosting factors high on reliability because the computational resources are offered by a network of servers, and failure of one does not impact the overall quality of service provided. However, when built the right way, with failover destinations available, dedicated infrastructure can rise up to the level of cloud computing in terms of reliability and accessibility. 

Dedicated hosting is prohibitively expensive

We now come to the third and final most prevalent misconception about dedicated server hosting. In case of shared hosting, the cost gets distributed among the users making it an inexpensive hosting option. On the other hand, it is but natural to expect that you will have to shell out more money if you wish the entire server to be at your disposal.  However, benefits outweigh the cost by a fair margin as dedicated hosting keeps your revenue generating website going despite fluctuations in network traffic. A little bit of down time can cost an ecommerce website huge losses; dedicated hosting services offered by a quality service provider ensures that this never happens.