8 Reasons Why Dedicated Hosting Can Be the Perfect Upgrade for Your Business
A successful online business is a bustling marketplace. But what if that market has long checkout lines, slow service, and questionable security? As your website thrives and attracts more customers, you’ll need to be sure it can handle the growing demands. This is where Dedicated Hosting comes in – offering the power and control to scale your website and provide a premium experience for your visitors. Here’s 8 reasons why Dedicated Hosting might be the perfect upgrade for your business. What is Website Hosting? Web Hosting is all about the infrastructure that goes into getting your site online. It’s the digital space that houses your website, allowing visitors to access your content whenever they enter your domain name in their web browser. The vast majority of websites are hosted on servers located elsewhere. After you’ve closed your laptop, your website remains open on servers. Visitors can browse and interact with it anywhere, anytime. The data, files and code are continuously connected. So, unless your business has its own servers (or you’ve got one set up in your wardrobe) you’ll be looking towards some sort of hosting option. The beauty of it is that you can focus on your core activities — leaving the technical aspects in the hands of hosting providers. What’s the difference between Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting? Shared Hosting is the most common type of hosting. It’s called ‘shared’ because multiple website owners are given a slice of the same server resources. Shared Hosting is ideal for beginners and most small-to-medium-sized websites with moderate traffic. As a way to offer products or services and reach a wider audience, it’s a cost-effective option for websites that require a decent amount of bandwidth and processing power. See also: What is Shared Hosting? A Beginner’s Guide Shared Hosting can however come with its own set of limitations. First and foremost, because those resources are divvied-up between multiple websites on a server, there’s the possibility that performance will take a hit if they all see a spike in traffic. Larger enterprises, with ever-expanding digital needs, may need more control and flexibility. Dedicated Hosting answers this question by providing the best possible performance and complete resource ownership. With Dedicated Hosting, a single website gets an entire server for itself. You’re essentially renting an entire physical server for your own exclusive use. That means exclusive access to all your own resources, including: ✅ CPU usage – Handling all the calculations and tasks needed to run your website.✅ RAM – Storing the temporary website files and data for a website to run smoothly.✅ Disk Space – Holding all your website’s files, images, databases, and so on.✅ Bandwidth – All the data that can be transferred between your website and visitors’ devices in a given time. Taking disk space as just an example, in the case of Shared Hosting, the storage is divided among all the websites on the server. That means a specific amount is allocated to your website. With Dedicated Hosting, you get the entire server’s disk space to yourself. This provides much more flexibility and scalability; you can store as much website data as you need without worrying about limitations. In a nutshell, Dedicated Hosting gives you the power to deliver larger amounts of traffic and sales, run more complex apps, and so on. So while Shared Hosting can be a great starting point, you might decide it’s time to upgrade as your business grows. 8 Benefits of Dedicated Hosting 1. Unbeatable Performance Shared hosting resources are divided among multiple websites. With Dedicated Hosting, your website has its own server, granting exclusive access to processing power, memory, and storage. A dedicated server guarantees a predictable level of performance. You have exclusive access to CPU, RAM, and storage, eliminating the concern of neighbouring websites draining resources and impacting your website’s speed and functionality. This translates to: Faster Loading Times. Unleashed, unthrottled. No more waiting for shared resources to free up. Dedicated servers deliver lightning-fast loading speeds, crucial for keeping visitors engaged and improving your website’s user experience. Smoother Operation. Dedicated resources bring performance for your website to run smoothly even during peak traffic hours. This eliminates lags, glitches, and frustrating delays that can drive customers away. 123 Reg Premium Hosting comes with unlimited bandwidth. That means lightning-fast loading speeds for your site no matter how heavy the traffic, boosting your conversions and search engine rankings. 2. Customisation Shared hosting plans often limit software installation and server configuration options. Dedicated hosting empowers you to tailor your server environment to your website’s specific needs. Whether you require specialised software for e-commerce transactions, custom applications, or a unique content management system (CMS), a dedicated server offers the flexibility to make it happen. You can choose Managed or Unmanaged hosting. That means you can get your server provider to handle the maintenance or handle it yourself. 3. Reliability Shared Hosting can be susceptible to downtime if other websites on the server experience traffic spikes or technical issues. Dedicated Hosting eliminates this risk. With your own server, you experience minimal disruptions and guarantee consistent uptime — keeping your website accessible to your customers — while minimising potential revenue loss. 4. Scalability As your business grows, so will your website traffic and resource demands. Dedicated Hosting provides the flexibility to scale alongside your needs. You can upgrade your server’s processing power, memory, and storage — all off-site — to accommodate surges in traffic or to introduce new features that require added resources. Your website remains reliable and performs the best it can at every stage of your business growth. 5. Complete Server Control Dedicated Hosting grants you root or administrative access to your server. That is, you have complete control over server configuration, software installation, and more. You have the power to install custom software, manage server settings, and configure your environment exactly as needed. You have the freedom to make adjustments and optimisations to be sure your website performs at its peak potential. 123 Reg Premium Hosting uses the cPanel
Before You Go Live: Why Website Staging Matters
Going live with a website is like a new show opening at the theatre: you’ll want a dress rehearsal before making the grand debut. Luckily, staging offers a kind of backstage area where you can test out what works and what doesn’t, experiment with new ideas, and iron out any problems. That way, you can be sure of polished performance when stepping out in front of that audience. Imagine that you’re a travel writer with your own website and blog. You published the latest update to your homepage a few hours ago but, alas — you’ve only just noticed the embarrassing spelling mistake sat within the main banner. And oh no, what’s this? To make matters worse, the subscribe button for your mailing list seems to have stopped working entirely! Hiccups like this can put a dent in one’s online image, but they’re an easy fix. Most visitors are happy to let it slide. In their eyes, you may remain the chief authority on backpacking in East Asia (even if you can’t spell Angkor Wat correctly). A few visitors might leave playful remarks in the comments section. Worst comes to worst, a certain number will bounce. Let’s scale this up. You’re a local business owner. Each month, you shift a respectable volume of goods to customers all across the UK. Your latest update goes live on a Tuesday morning, but… there’s a glitch. Customers are no longer able to complete their purchases. No sales go through for an agonising 48 hours until the fix is found. This kind of error has the potential to damage customer loyalty and confidence long after it’s been put to bed. At the level of major companies and organisations, a website glitch can have catostrophic consequences. Going live with a broken webpage might pull the plug on a service that thousands (or millions) of users depend on. More than an operational nightmare, this is a potential PR disaster, with possible legal implications. And all of this from one innocent click. Fortunately, there’s a tried and tested way to stop this all from happening. What is Website Staging? A staging site is a behind-the-scenes copy of a website. It’s a private space where you can get updates ready, or try out new things, away from public view. Also known as a test environment, a development site, a sandbox, or simply a test site, the basic principle is the same across pretty much all content management systems (CMS). Most website owners will want to have one. There are times when even the most simple of updates may cause puzzling and unexpected issues. Remember also that your live site is always receiving traffic from visitors; if you make changes while they’re browsing, this can affect their experience. Website staging acts like a secret lab where you can tinker with your site’s design, add new features, or fix bugs without the risk of breaking your live site. You’re free to polish your content and make sure everything is up and running before clicking the update button. How Does Website Staging Work? A staging site is typically created as a subdomain of your website’s main domain, like “staging.yoursite.com”. This subdomain houses a clone of your primary website, along with all its essential components — including files, databases, and configurations. This replication is achieved through various services or plugins, depending on your platform, such as WordPress. Within this staging environment, you have the freedom to experiment with new themes, plugins, and core updates, all without affecting the live site that your visitors interact with. This subdomain is basically your dedicated testing ground, ensuring that any changes made can be thoroughly assessed before going live. The staging process follows a clear sequence: You start by duplicating your live website to create the staging environment. Then, you can make your alterations, update themes, plugins, and test new features without disrupting your live site’s operation. After testing testing to make sure everything works fine within the staging area, it’s then time to deploy the changes to your live site. The process is just a few clicks away and it’s easy to keep everything updated without the stress. Visitors will see the finished product, not a work in progress — so important for making a good impression and keeping visitors coming back. The “Push” for Perfection Pushing is the techie term to describe moving changes from the staging environment to the actual pages the audience sees. Technically speaking, there are two levels: ✓ Simple Push is used for minor tweaks, such as fixing typos or swapping photos—these are quick fixes and don’t typically risk your site’s stability. Casual users would likely refer to this more simply as “publishing” or “posting”. ✓ Advanced Push is for the bigger things, such as new features or changes in theme, that overhaul the look of a site. For example, an online shop might use advanced push to introduce a new checkout interface to users currently shopping, or to switch the entire colour scheme and layout to match a seasonal promotion without disrupting the shopping experience. Stages of Development When teams of developers work together, they tend to stick to quite a structured process. The first phase is called the Local Environment, in which devs work individually to experiment with ideas and start to form a website in a private space. As the website starts to come together, the next step is the Development Environment, which can be hosted online for collaborative work by the team. The Staging Environment, then, is the second-to-last stop for final checks. The staged site can then move to its Live or Production Stage for public viewing. Of course, not all of us are working in a team. With a user-friendly Website Builder or WordPress, it’s never been easier to create great websites fast. Solo users and small businesses can skip the “Local” and “Development” stages and jump right to staging — the key thing is to stage before going
Is your website host expecting the unexpected?
In business reliability matters, but it’s an unfortunate fact that some things are out of your hands. Companies inevitably have to put their trust in others in order to operate successfully. It might be the courier service that takes your product to the customer, or the electricity supplier that keeps your computers running; whatever sector you’re in, no business stands alone. But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and if one of the companies you rely on encounters problems, it can stop you providing a top class service leading to lost customers and lost income. Although you can’t completely protect yourself against such occurrences, you can mitigate them by placing your trust in the right partners. Here at 123-reg we know how much our customers rely on their websites to generate business and attract customers – that’s why we take steps to ensure the unforeseen doesn’t lead to your company going offline. Preparing for the unknown Take our core name servers, which are located in two separate data centres in Leeds, England and Cologne, Germany. On the face of it, that seems like an insignificant fact, but in practice this set up means that if one of our data centres is hit by a power cut, or worse, then the other one can take up the slack so your website will stay online. When a website host runs all its name servers out of one location and something goes wrong, websites go offline meaning businesses are left hanging until the issue is resolved. In short, businesses and website owners, big and small, can trust 123-reg to keep them online because we’re prepared for the unexpected.