02-18-09 | Blog Post
The term “Dedicated Server” became common with the birth of the web hosting industry. Hosting providers like Online Tech would put multiple web sites on a single server. This became known as “shared” server hosting.
Due to security or volume, some websites required a server that was “dedicated” to just their website. That dedicated server wouldn’t host any other websites and a company could do whatever they wanted to that server- hence the term “dedicated server” was born.
Dedicated servers are contracted for a certain number of months (e.g. 24) for a specific monthly fee (e.g. $ 199/month). This generally includes: the server hardware; part replacement including service; a secure data center environment (but not always); and a connection to the Internet. The server configuration (mostly the selection of CPU, disk space and memory), the amount of internet access and the quality of the hardware, and the type of data center will generally dictate the monthly fees.
Dedicated server hosting is ideal for companies who want to focus their IT staff on leveraging the power of their applications rather than managing the server, network and data centers. Generally, a dedicated server does not include server management functions like security, backups, restores, system administration functions and monitoring that a “managed” dedicated server would include.
In an upcoming posting we’ll talk more about the differences between a raw dedicated server and a managed dedicated server and the pros and cons of each.
