5 Ways a Dedicated Server Can Help Your Business

What’s in this article

This article outlines five ways a dedicated server can benefit businesses, including improved performance, exceptionality, enhanced security, scalability, and customization options. It provides insights into how investing in a dedicated server can support business growth and efficiency in the online landscape.

Using a dedicated server can bring many benefits to your business, people are often turned off by having to pay a premium for hosting. The longterm benefits of dedicated hosting actually outweigh the cost in the long run. 

What are these long term benefits? Are these benefits right for you and your businesses needs? Let’s break it down further.

1) Exclusivity

The most significant difference and benefit of having your own dedicated server vs shared hosting are that the dedicated server is all yours. Yep, a whole server for your exclusive use! 

Everything from the server’s disk space and ram to bandwidth is now all yours. 

The servers CPU and RAM now belong to you, no more being at the mercy of the traffic of other sites. During peak business times, you get peak performance. 

With your new server, comes root access – a key advantage to dedicated hosting. Congratulations, you can now add your own software, configure the servers setting and access server logs. 

Need to run your own applications, how about implementing special security measures? Want to use an entirely different operating system? Good news – you can do all of that and more! The server works for you, flexibly and responsively fulfilling the needs of your business. 

2) Flexibility

Dedicated servers are built to accommodate your current and future business needs, you decide on the servers configuration. Nothing is static, this applies to your website and server. As growth comes, you increase the number of or modify applications. Your server provides the flexibility needed to change as new opportunities arise. 

A dedicated server means scalability for your business (such as PSA) with the power to add more; processing, storage, and back up your site. 

The modern customer not only has high expectations, but they have a short attention span. Customers want convenient, quick load times for better user experience – this is especially true for online stores and boutiques. If you give them the experience they want, they will return!

3) Reliability and performance

One benefit of exclusivity is reliability. When you have a dedicated server, you can reliably run at peak performance.

When your server runs reliably, crashes are much less likely to occur! Want to optimise your customer experience? Have videos and images to tell your brand’s story?  The bandwidth is there with a dedicated server to handle both! 

Leave your footprint on the web, without investing a whole ton of capital. Managed dedicated hosting is not only affordable, but it also future-proofs your brand’s digital presence.

4) Faster loading times that improve search engine rankings

Web page loading times are a crucial search engine optimisation rankings factor. Dedicated servers allow your website to load faster, improving the user experience for your visitors, while helping to improve your search engine rankings. Slow, highly congested servers can have the opposite effect on your rankings.

5) Security

A dedicated server will only permit access to you or your company, the infrastructure will include firewalls as well as security monitoring. 

Malware and hacks? Forget about it! The host will be monitoring the network, but secure firewalls and strict access allows you to worry about what matters most; your business. 

Service attacks? Those are in the past with data separation. Your dedicated server is isolated from the hosting companies services, and other data belong to customers. This separation ensures quick recovery from backend exploitation. 

You also hold power, with the option to implement higher levels of security. This may come in the form of applications installed to run on the server for security and access control purposes. 

This adds a level of protection to your customer and proprietary business data. You safeguard your customer and business data, again, through separation.

In the end, it’s crucial to protect not only your businesses data but also data belonging to your customers. 

Dedicated hosting carries several benefits—future proof your brand and your web presence by investing in the long term benefits of dedicated hosting. 

AT Heart Digital, we offer high quality, dedicated hosting, provided by Australians for Australians. 

Our quality Australian servers deliver high performance and stability for your business website:

✅ Servers are checked daily for security & protection.

✅ No overloading, this ensured premium performance and stability for your website

✅ Backed up daily, e-mails, databases, none of your data is ever lost.

✅ All our servers are monitored 24/7, secure, reliable and fast web hosting.

Contact us today to get a free quote for a hosting solution that works for you!

Dedicated servers are a great way to speed up larger websites, such as those for Richards GC Removals and TW Accounting.

Need help building quality backlinks to your site?

If you do wish to build links for your business site, get in touch with a trusted Gold Coast SEO company such as Heart Digital, who provide eCommerce SEO servicesGoogle Ads services and much more.

Fast loading sites are now an expectation

Many people spend hours of each day browsing the web and using various net-based apps. However, the majority of the sites that people interact with are big name companies whose services are hosted on lightning-fast servers. This creates an extremely high expectation for speed.

People who browse for products on Amazon, eBay and other major retailers will have become accustomed to having pages load near-instantly for them. If they visit your site and discover that pages are taking far longer to load than what they’re used to, do you think they’re going to stop and think, “hey, this site is awfully slow, however, I understand that it’s only a small business website and therefore I can’t expect it to be anywhere near as fast as Nike or Apple’s site”. No! They’ll be more likely to say, “this website is garbage. I’m outta here.”

It's detrimental to the growth and longevity of your business

Word of mouth is extremely important for business growth, particularly startups. If your slow website creates a miserable experience for customers, they’re going to be far less inclined to refer your business to friends and family.

Conclusion

Website speed is crucial for both user experience and SEO performance. Fast-loading websites reduce bounce rates, improve user satisfaction, and are favored by Google’s ranking algorithm. Well, this article has discussed more facts you should know about the topic.

Frequently asked questions

Interested in finding out more about Heart Digital and our services? Here are some of our most frequently asked questions.

Got another question for us? Please contact us.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, are the steps taken to appear highly on Google search results, or other search engines. For example, if you are based on the Gold Coast and have a power outage, you will need an electrician. In 2022, the first thing most people will do is an online search for “Gold Coast electrician” and then contact one of the highest-ranking businesses in the search results.

For the electricians that appear high in the search results, their ranking can be incredibly valuable and a steady source of new business. For those who do not rank highly, and appear beyond page one of the search results, they often rely solely on word of mouth and / or referrals to attract new business. For most businesses, limiting new business to a network of contacts can make growth almost impossible.

A good SEO agency can help get your business to the top of the Google rankings and turbocharge business growth.

A well-designed website is only half the battle. Afterall, a stylish website is of no value if no-one ever visits it.  Most businesses need a steady flow of visitors to ensure their website is front and centre for customers when they search for a specific product or service…and on Google there is more than enough traffic to go round – every second (on average) there are 63,000 Google searches!

Beyond attracting traffic, there are many other SEO benefits:

  • SEO offers much higher close rates (about 15 per cent) for new leads when compared with other forms of marketing (often less than two per cent).
  • SEO brings quality traffic to your website. When you begin an SEO campaign, your website is updated to incorporate specific keywords relevant to the traffic you need to attract. This ensures that you zero in on your preferred audience that are most interested in your business’ product or service.
  • SEO is very measurable, making it easy to understand results and return on investment.
  • SEO, particularly for e-commerce businesses, ensures your business is open 24/7. This means that potential customers can engage with your business, leave enquiries and even make transactions when your business is not ‘open’.
  • SEO can level the playing field among businesses sizes. We’ve helped small retailers outrank conglomerates like Myer and a family construction business dominate multi-nationals, among countless other examples. None have the budget of the bigger companies, but with a well-executed SEO campaign, they can thrive online.
  • SEO is very sustainable. For a relatively small budget, SEO can be an ongoing strategy that can be more effective than traditional marketing and thereby reduce spend in these areas.
  • SEO need not be tied to geographical boundaries. You can expand your SEO campaign as your business grows, with minimal additional expanse. For example, if you are a Gold Coast business looking for customers in Brisbane, or vice versa, increasing this reach is possible via an SEO campaign.
  • Utilising SEO techniques ensures you have a better website. At the heart of effective SEO, is an ongoing obsession to improve the user (visitor) experience. When Google sees this, they improve rankings, but it also means that websites that do SEO properly are generally more functional and easier-to-use.

A do-it-yourself approach is always a possibility. However, it is worth considering that the learning curve is incredibly steep (and the goal posts move regularly!). Those taking on an SEO campaign themselves will need to consider page optimisation, conversion rate optimisation, keyword research, Google My Business, link building, content creation, use of metrics ….the list goes on. The reality is that there are many moving parts in any successful SEO campaign.

Given these challenges, we think it makes sense to work with a reputable SEO agency. And our experience over the years has told us that the agency approach will always prove more successful, cheaper and faster than keeping SEO in-house.

Working with a team that lives and breathes SEO each day will represent your best chance of SEO having a material impact on your business’ growth.

With more than a billion websites in 2022, SEO campaigns can take a few months to gain traction. This is most relevant in competitive industries and/or major metropolitan locations. For more niche businesses and / or smaller geographic locations, we’ve often seen a surge in rankings within weeks.

SEO is not a short-term fix though – it does require an ongoing commitment from clients. Along with hard work, patience and expertise from your chosen SEO agency.

Brace yourself for a frustrating answer (sorry!) – it depends. The cost of SEO is determined by several factors including:

  • Industry competitiveness – some industries are far more competitive than others. Playing SEO catch up against businesses with well-established online presences, takes time and costs money.
  • Geographic locations – to state the obvious, Brisbane is going to be harder market to crack for SEO compared to Southport on the Gold Coast. That is definitely not to say it is impossible to see great results in Brisbane, it just can take more time and resources (which drives up the price).
  • Your website – is it SEO ready, or are you going to need major changes before you can launch an effective SEO campaign? Potentially this can add some cost to the start of your SEO campaign.

We’ve have to have a look at your website, as there could be a number of reasons why you’ve seen a drop in traffic.

If your drop in traffic is fairly sudden, we’d encourage you to have a read of our Google Penalty Recovery Services page.

If the drop in traffic has happened over a long period of time, the reasons are likely to be less sinister. One reason could be that your competitors are now focused on SEO and have got the jump on your business. Or it could be time for your business to revisit its own SEO and find out the reason for the deterioration.

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