One of the primary concerns of every business is the website speed. It has many serious implications. When a website page takes a long time to upload a visitor just walks away to another site. A slow site affects the visitor conversion rates and is also a bad sign for SEO as Google considers speed as one of the factors for better page rankings. This is distressing for every online business and all moves like links, content and social media promotions are just a waste of efforts and money. Every second counts and a delay can mean a visitor moving away to a competitor’s site.
The crucial options:
This has made several businesses wonder if dedicated server is the right solution to get an improved site speed. But it also means a business has to be technically competent to manage and maintain the server or opt for the managed dedicated hosting which is very expensive and beyond the budget of the small and growing businesses. To their surprise and satisfaction, the organizations find a lot of difference in the website loading speed and they never looked back again with better conversions and improved business.
Why is there a difference?
When an entity buys a dedicated server they are just running their own website or applications on the entire server. They alone are occupying the entire space which otherwise is shared among numerous sites in the other hosting option. All the resources are enjoyed by their single business. In shared hosting, the provider accommodates many websites and has to ensure that all sites get the resources. They allocate limited quantities of space, bandwidth, RAM, CPU etc. to all the sites. This makes it very affordable and is fine with a small business that has just started.
Crunch of resources:
The problem starts when that small business starts growing and there is an increase in traffic movement. They will need more space to add new content and are hampered with the limited resources they get from the shared hosting. Overdrawing of resources leads to server crashing which keeps all businesses down. The only logical solution in such cases is to get a dedicated server to get more reliability, speed and availability.
But again, the critical question that arises is whether every business can afford a dedicated server to stay ahead with their competitors? If dedicated server is the only alternative why doesn’t Google insist on businesses to buy dedicated server for better page ranking?
If speed is the sole criteria, an entity has several other options than to buy a dedicated server like
- A WordPress website can optimize their site speed by using the W3 total cache (W3TC).
- Using Javascripts excessively for social media buttons and themes can slow down a website speed considerably. Asynchronous or Deferred are two options available. Asynchronous loading of scripts allows the scripts to be executed when the HTML parsing and loading of scripts is done. This takes lesser load speed. Another way is by deferring the script putting the HTML load on the visitor’s browser before executing the scripts. The best way to improve site speed is by optimizing for both Asynchronous and Deferred.
- Using CDN (content delivery network) which is self-hosted will allow a visitor access to static files from another cookie less server reducing the pressure on the primary server while downloading all files concurrently.
But all said and done, dedicated server is more advantageous to businesses and gives them an edge over competition. With a dedicated server you have complete control to tune it to any form to suit your business needs which you cannot think of in the other hosting option. You have the complete resources all to yourself and will never have to fear of any shortage. Since there is no other website consuming the bandwidth and space you can be assured of high upload speed and of accommodating traffic of any volume. You will surely improve your SEO rankings with the quality of speed that dedicated servers offer. It is worth the price you pay.
