Many businesses that start out on the web or start out complimenting brick-and-mortar services with an online component start their websites on shared servers. This is simply the most affordable option for most websites, and it is getting increasingly reliable and easy to use. As your website grows, though, you may need to think about moving to dedicated servers. These are basically servers that you rent in their entirety from the hosting service that you use. Here are a few indications that it might be time to move your business website to a dedicated server.

If your website is just running slow and experiencing lots of crashes and problems related to speed and reliability, it may be time to switch. When you’re sharing server space with other websites, your reliability and speed is going to go down. For small to midsized websites, this isn’t normally a problem. As your site starts to grow, though, you may find that you’re losing potential customers because of issues with reliability. A server of your own can help you work this out.

If you’re ready to hire your own full staff for dealing with the administrative piece of your website so that you can more easily manipulate it, then it could be time to move to a dedicated web hosting. This type of server will allow you to run whatever sort of platforms and software you want, and you’ll have complete control over it. You have to have the right kind of staff to use this kind of server, though.

Finally, if you start bringing in customized e-commerce and database applications, you may be forced to move to a dedicated web server. Shared servers simply can’t hold up to some customizations. Moving to a server that is all your own allows you to run all these applications however you prefer to do so.