If you are serious about your online business, you might just consider looking for online dedicated hosting. The definition of dedicated hosting is having an entire server which is at the webmaster's disposal, and which is not shared with anybody.

This obviously has more advantages than shared hosting because you, as the web site developer, have full control over the server, including option of operating system, hardware, etc. You can customize everything according to your preferences, while the administration is handled by the hosting company.

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

Before dedicated servers, a web site developer 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 web site served from a common web server.

The hosting company would try to provide a wide range of options for the web site developer, 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.

A simple example might be a site which required a database to store the priceless information. Many hosting companies would provide the standard MySQL database to use on their servers. If your application requires another type of database though, then it could prove to be incompatible with the shared hosting account.

Webmasters 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 much better performance doesn't come cheap. 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 company.

That's why you need to be sure that you want to take your business seriously, and you really need a dedicated server before plunging in. But if your business is thriving and you have a lot of traffic, online dedicated hosting may be the right option for you.