Do customers go for semi-dedicated servers only because they can’t afford dedicated servers? Does a semi-dedicated server solve all or most of the important purposes served by a dedicated server? Is it a better choice to offer compared to VPS? These are some of the common questions that don’t just pop-up in the minds of customers, but also some of the new hosts. To begin with, one should accept the fact that there is a certain ambiguity around the term “semi-dedicated”, which also forces one to ask if this means a server that is partially dedicated to you, but is different from shared hosting? Well then let us start with the basics to eventually go deeper into the things.
What are Semi-Dedicated Servers?
VPS is a better option compared to shared servers but when we talk about semi-dedicated servers, things change a lot as they come with many advantages. Let us first understand what a semi-dedicated server exactly is.
It is self-explanatory that semi-dedicated server refers to a server, which is not totally allotted to a customer and is very much owned by the hosting provider. Although you do not dedicate the total server to a customer, you do offer greater control, which means the customers gets root level access to certain parts of a server.
Not Too Many Customers Share the Server Resources
Just like shared hosting, even in case of semi-dedicated hosting the customers share the servers with other; only difference in this case is that a bigger chunk is allotted to each customer. A semi-dedicated server is not shared by more than 10-20 websites, which makes life easier for both you as a host, as well as your customers.
Faster Access
As the webmasters share the resources of a server with only a handful of websites, the overall experience is far better as they get more disk space, more bandwidth and much more control plus they can opt for many number of applications at the same time. Customers often need more disk space, control and bandwidth, but taking a big leap from shared hosting to dedicated server is something that not many organizations and customers can afford.
Often both VPS and semi-dedicated servers come handy in such situations. In case of semi-dedicated servers, the entire server is sub-divided into slices and customers can select either a big or a small slice depending upon their requirements.
Advantages of Semi-Dedicated Hosting
Following are some of the obvious advantages of using semi-dedicated hosting:
• It is much more affordable compared to dedicated server hosting.
• It is the best option for customers looking for few features of dedicated servers, but don’t want a fully dedicated server yet.
• You, as a host, have to manage the server completely keeping the customers away from the server management aspects.
• Semi-dedicated servers offer much better performance as only few accounts share the resources that the server has to offer.
• Customers get more resources compared to shared servers, and with more disk space and bandwidth, customers can install many more applications.