Dedicated hosting simply means the kind of web hosting services where the entire web server is leased (or sold) to a customer (one hosting account). Depends on customer’s preference, a dedicated hosting can be used by a single website; or it can be shared and used by multiple websites in the same time (just like normal shared hosting). What’s important is that the server resources can be only consumed by just one hosting account.

What’s good about a dedicated hosting?

Generally, dedicated hosting plans come with better features and usage flexibility.

Dedicated hosting users get full control over server operating system, server hardware specifications, website bandwidth allocation (in case several websites are hosted on the account), and custom web installation. Also for certain hosting providers, a team of technical personnel is assigned to service dedicated hosting users – in other words, better technical supports.

Dedicated Hosting: Managed vs Unmanaged

Depends on different hosting providers, the supervision tasks of a dedicated server can be fully in-charged by the user or the provider. As this time of writing, we are still lack of proper guidelines or standards to define the management role of dedicated hosting providers.
Nevertheless in general, dedicated hosting plans in the market are actually ‘Managed Hosting Plans’ – where users will have full control over the hosting server; but the grunt work (such as server maintenance, software installation, security auditing, intrusion detection, server backups, and applications updates) will be done by the merchants. Furthermore, to ease consumer’s hassles, hosting providers often offer dedicated hosting plans with preset server specifications.

For example, table below shows dedicated hosting plans offered by Hostgator. Note that how hardware specifications and base operating system are preset from the very beginning.

* Ref: Hostgator Dedicated Hosting.

When is the right time to take up a dedicated hosting plan?

Situation where a dedicated hosting is recommended:

• When your website pulls in massive traffics.
• When your website require a lot of processing power for heavy web applications.
• When the website security is your first priority.
• When you have insufficient resources (manpower or knowledge) to handle your own dedicated server.

Do you need a dedicated server?

Now the key question – is dedicated hosting right for you?

If you are an individual webmaster or blogger, dedicated hosting is most probably unnecessary to you. Unless you are pulling in hundreds of thousands unique visitors per day, individual website/blog normally does not require that much of server resources.
Without doubt a dedicated server is better in term of reliability and flexibility; but you should be aware that such hosting option is also much more expensive.