This is much more convenient than shared hosting because you, as the webmaster, have full control over the server, including choice of operating system, hardware, etc. Administration, however, is still handled by the hosting company.

The greatest advantage of using dedicated hosting is that your website performance will not be affected by high traffic websites with which you would have been sharing your server's bandwidth. The dedicated hosting environment provides an exclusive server or servers devoted solely to your web site. You do not share a server with other customers, and you avoid shared hosting.

Before dedicated servers, a webmaster used to have two hosting options, the low-priced shared hosting model and the premium-priced dedicated server. A person who bought space on a shared host would receive a certain amount of disk space and monthly transfer, and would have the site served from a common web server.

The hosts would try to provide a wide range of options for the webmaster, in order to increase to popularity of their products. But, unfortunately, a customer who needed a non-standard program installed or who wanted to use a privileged account in order for a particular utility to run would be completely not allowed to achieve these goals.

One example might be a site which required a database to store the priceless information. Many hosts would provide the MySQL database to use on their servers. If your application required another type of database, then it wouldn't be compatible with the shared hosting account.

Users who don't fit into the standard shared hosting model and find that it doesn't work anymore for them, or whose sites grew very popular and required a large amount of resources have one alternative though: hosting their sites on a dedicated server.

A dedicated server can be customized to exactly fit the needs of a site developer. That's where the name is from. If a particular database were needed, it could be installed instantly, as there were no other users to please.

While dedicated servers can be customized and can handle much more traffic than a shared hosting account, their enhanced performance can sometimes come with a high price tag.

A typical dedicated server can cost hundreds of dollars per month depending on its size, network connectivity and the amount of management required from the hosting provider. That's why you need to be sure that you want to take your business seriously, and you need a dedicated server. And with all the competition going on out there, you might just find some cheap dedicated hosting.