If you want to jump straight to the answer, our top pick for dedicated hosting is Liquid Web. 100% network uptime, fastest servers & great support. Prices start at $99/month. Click here to explore Liquid Web’s Dedicated Hosting plans or read their review below.
Here’s the best dedicated hosting companies based on our expert analysis
#1: Liquid Web Dedicated Hosting
If your enterprise requires dedicated servers to host your website, this means that there is a lot on the line in finding the right one. This is something you can afford to be cheap with, as you get what you pay for.
Liquid Web Hosting is the preferred choice for a lot of big sites who need a top-quality service to ensure everything runs smoothly. You don’t have to be a big site though to appreciate the benefits or justify the cost of going with a provider among the very best in the world.
You not only want the best technology, you need it managed in the best way as well. Some sites like to manage their servers themselves, but even if you do have the personnel to do this, this is better left up to experts with intimate knowledge of their own servers and data centers.
Liquid Web Hosting’s award-winning dedicated server service takes care of all the details for you so you can enjoy the best of dedicated servers while spending all of your time improving your sites. They not only provide the hardware and technology you need, customized to perfectly fit you, their performance is top-notch and they have a dedicated team to ensure you get the most out of your web hosting experience. They are an outstanding choice in dedicated and managed web hosting. This is our top recommendation.
LiquidWeb Dedicated Hosting Vs Other Popular Hosts
| Hosting Comparison → | LiquidWeb | Hostgator | GoDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uptime SLAs | 100% | 99.9% | 99.9% |
| 24/7 On-site Support | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Built-in Backup Drives | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Off Server Backups By Default | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Root Level | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-level DDoS Protection | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Fast SSD Storage | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| RAM | 16GB | 8GB | 16GB |
#2: Dreamhost Dedicated Hosting
Calling yourself Dreamhost is a lot to live up to, but they actually live up to the name by providing truly top-quality dedicated server hosting services. Dedicated hosting is far from a one size fits all solution, and Dreamhost has a variety of options and pricing to serve the needs of sites that are just starting to need the much greater power and flexibility of a dedicated server, on up to those who need the most powerful services to take care of their needs the right way.
It’s not enough to be good or even great to make our list of top recommendations for dedicated server web hosting, as we need to see a lot of value as well, and Dreamhost stands out in all areas, particularly with the greatness of the quality that they offer. They offer 9 different plans from the entry level 4 core, 4 GB of RAM and 1 TB of HDD storage, right up to 12 core, 64 GB of RAM and 240 GB SSD for those who need the utmost in speed and power.
Everything comes with an 100% uptime guarantee, the latest and greatest software, and 24/7 expert support to ensure everyone is completely taken care of at all times. Getting disappointed with web hosting is painful and expensive, but Dreamhost makes sure it all runs like a dream.
What is a Dedicated Hosting Server?
Anyone that’s ever had a website knows that you need to connect to the internet through a hosting service, where they host your site on their servers and deliver your content to your site’s visitors.
You essentially rent out space on their servers and select a rental plan where you pay a certain amount of money per month for the space and support. Smaller sites who only need a bit of space choose shared hosting, with many sites on the server and with the cost of running it being shared across all the sites on it.
On the other end of the scale is dedicated server hosting, where you have a whole server all to yourself and also choose various hardware options to suit your needs. This works just like choosing a computer for yourself, where you pick things like processor speed, number of cores, RAM, storage speed, and storage capacity.
Since this is the big time in hosting, you also get access to the latest and greatest software, so your server and your site can be better optimized. Sites worthy of dedicated server hosting have more robust needs, such as enhanced security, greater stability and uptime, more bandwidth capacity, top of the line support, and so on.
Since you aren’t sharing with these packages, you have to pay for the whole server yourself, as well as whatever add-ons and upgrades that you choose. This is not the cheap few bucks a month plan and costs much more, but sites that need this level of service happily pay for it as it allows their sites to operate with the speed and capacity to make their web sites hum and keep the cash flowing.
Dedicated server hosting both comes in managed and unmanaged plans. Choosing unmanaged requires you to manage your server yourself, and the fact that this is offered does tell us that some clients do choose this, but this requires that you outsource it or deploy an in-house team to do it. For most users, this may not be practical or desirable, so letting the host manage it for you makes a lot of sense or may even be the only good option.
Who Needs Dedicated Hosting?
The majority of sites run just fine on the starter level shared hosting plans, and if you run a smaller site you’ll find everything you need to keep it humming nicely. The bigger your business, the greater your needs are, and this applies to websites as well.
As the needs of your site grows, shared hosting ends up lacking the capacity to meet your needs, as your site becomes more complex and gets more traffic than your site can optimally serve. This is like building a narrow road in one of those city sim games and needing to upgrade it as the traffic grows. When you need a freeway, in steps dedicated hosting.
You need more than a fast car and a big complex highway though, you need people to run it, and the bigger the highway, the more expertise you need to keep it running properly. Every part of your web hosting solution needs to be top notch when you travel in the fast lane, especially because if it isn’t, your competitors will leave you in the dust.
So, this isn’t just about seeing your organic needs being taken care of optimally, you also need to view this competitively, where for instance a competitor may have a slight speed advantage and be more loved by the search engines. In this game, love converts to money.
These are all things that can be measured, how your sites perform for your visitors and how they compare against the sites that you are competing with. We also don’t just be wanting to keep up, we want to also build in the extra capacity we need to allow our sites to grow seamlessly. Just trying to avoid bottlenecks doesn’t get it done, we need to plan ahead as we always do in business.
This process applies the same way from going from entry level hosting to the next rung up on the ladder. People don’t just go from shared hosting to dedicated servers, they choose a more modest journey up the ladder where you seek to work your way up to the highest step. If you are a step or two away, this is where you start considering going with the best.
Once you have decided that you may benefit from the luxury of your own web server, this is where the options really explode, where you can go from an entry level plan with modest options and pricing all the way up to the most robust plans, or even have a customized one put together to match your needs with precision. This is the pro version of hosting to be sure.
How to Choose a Dedicated Hosting Server
There are several important considerations in choosing the right dedicated server hosting for you, and the biggest one is the overall quality of a dedicated server hosting company. If you do not choose the very best, you simply will not end up with the very best, even though you may have saved a little money or found something you thought was adequate but only because you weren’t aware that there is better.
Once you have narrowed down your choices to the top 3, and we have done the work for you here with our expertly vetted top 3 recommendations for dedicated server hosting providers, this is where you do your part and explore the various packages that these top hosting companies offer.
Even when you have chosen one of the top hosts to go with, this is nothing like just plunking down a few dollars a month for a modest cookie-cutter approach, as dedicated hosting offers a wide array of options within this category of hosting and there is much to consider and decide.
This is not unlike starting with the basic model of a computer and then adding on the options you need. You don’t aways choose the best configurations because bigger costs more and since you are running a business when you run web sites, you need to make sure you are making the right business decisions by seeking to fully satisfy your particular needs while not going overboard and buying a lot more than you need.
Everyone desires things like very high uptimes, very close to 100% as being down costs you real money and reputation, great customer service, a high level of expertise and engineering to provide optimal support, the best software, and everything else important to ensure that everything happens the way you want and expect it to.
Beyond this, various plans can differ in not only what options they provide but what a particular configuration may cost. You may find that one host provides one configuration at a better price, but another may beat them on a different configuration. A lot of people take great pains to decide where they are going to spend their $5 a month in hosting, and given the considerably higher cost of dedicated servers, it also merits greater effort in selection.
So to sum it up, you need to first cut the list of prospects down to who offers the best services overall, and then from among these choices, you look to see who fits your needs the best.
How We Rank Dedicated Hosting Companies
The more you spend on something, the more attention you need to pay to making sure you get value for your money, where the difference between a great choice and a merely good one can add up to quite a bit of lost value.
The most important criterion when seeking the best dedicated server hosting companies is how much overall value they provide across their offerings. Regardless of your needs and your budget, you want to be selecting from providers that offer great value at all price points. This factors heavily in our selection process.
If we consider quality of a hosting company’s offerings as being the value side of the offers, we also want to account for the breadth of their offerings. This is not just a matter of having several packages, in this game, it’s especially about the flexibility that you have to fine tune your setup as needed and desired.
We need to also look at the reasons why people seek dedicated server hosting, and it’s not just about having a server to yourself, because everyone offers this. The quality of your server matters, allowing you to better leverage the increased performance that dedicated servers offer. You also want to be able to have enough options to choose from so you’ll be able to achieve the right fit with your current and expected needs.
There’s far more to a great setup than just having the right hardware configuration with your server, as software plays a big role in website management and performance. Like with hardware, there are different levels of software that you can add, and you want to make sure that your host offers enough top-quality software offerings to allow you to get the most out of your hosting.
This includes add-ons, and since we’re at the top level of website hosting, you want top level engineering solutions. Since most clients choose managed hosting over unmanaged, you want to make sure that you are getting the support you need to turn this into a genuine turn-key experience for you while at the same time having the peace of mind of knowing that you are really being taken care of.
Reliability and security are also cornerstones of a great managed hosting company. These categories are both much more prominent and important than with the smaller sites. Downtime ends up costing you more money and more loss of goodwill, and you also stand to lose more if your site becomes compromised.
The opinions of users count a lot as well of course, particularly those who have tried several providers and have had an opportunity to form an opinion. We especially pay attention to users ending up being disappointed with particular providers.
There’s a lot that goes into this analysis, as you can see, but we’ve done all the work to give you a short list of the very best in dedicated server hosting companies so you may then drill down to make the best choice for your needs.
Pros and Cons of Dedicated Servers
Dedicated servers offer the highest level of website hosting there is, and offer many big advantages over other types of hosting plans. The list includes all the things we should want to have from a hosting service, in whatever abundance we wish.
Having your very own server instead of having to share it with a few or even many others is just the start. Simply put, if you need your own server you surely should not be going with a shared solution that falls short of the mark, and we won’t do well with our sites if we are so willing to accept and endure failings.
It’s not so much about not sharing as it is being able to scale the server that hosts your sites to fit your needs. You can’t do this if you are sharing it. This allows us to have things set according to your needs in ways simply not possible with lesser plans.
Customized hardware is just the start though. We want to be able to take full advantage of everything else that comes with dedicated server hosting, the cutting-edge engineering and support, the bigger and better software solutions, the higher speed and reliability, the greater level of security, the much greater opportunity for customization, and everything else that comes with going with the best.
The only con that comes up with people is the price, but as long as you are going with a top service and you select your options well, better simply costs more. We get better at this so we can make more money overall, not less. It is all about value when you look at the cost of something, and the cost is only meaningful when we compare with what we get back, the benefits.
It is important to choose wisely and if you need the upper-level service of dedicated servers, the fact you’ve chosen this isn’t really optional, and it then just comes down to making sure that whatever configuration you choose within the realm of dedicated server hosting takes well care of all your needs.
Pros:
More robust
More options to choose from
More scalable
Higher performance
More reliable
More secure
Better support and expertise
Cons:
More expensive, but better does cost more
Summary of Dedicated Servers
When sites become so popular that they would benefit from the additional capacity of a dedicated server, this is no time to be frugal or stubborn. If you are hosting a site with pictures of your family or a blog that no one reads but you, even the cheapest hosting plans are going to offer you way more than you need, but you simply cannot select less of a plan.
Your hosting needs are therefore dependent on the scale of your operations, where bigger needs require bigger solutions. You don’t need a huge site to make sense of a dedicated server though, just enough of one to make choosing at least the entry level plan make sense.
This choice is therefore all about matching your chosen service with your needs, and while it’s a great idea to have some headroom here, some room for growth in other words, and go a little beyond your present needs, we need to make sure that we do not go too overboard with this lest we waste money.
Once we’ve made the decision to at least consider going with dedicated server hosting, there will be enough to do in deciding among the various options that are provided within this hosting format, and like with all business decisions, it really pays to shortlist the best candidates to make the process much easier for us.
We’ve made that part very easy for you, where we provide our top recommendations for the best dedicated hosting service companies out there based on overall quality. From there, you are now freed to simply seek out the best fit for you among these choices.
If you simply ask the providers about whether or not you should choose them, they are of course going to be pretty biased, so it’s crucial that you seek out independent professional advice, which we at Betterhost.com are happy to provide to you. Feel free to check out and compare among our recommended providers and then choose what fits your particular needs the best.
FAQ About Dedicated Hosting
What is the major disadvantage of shared hosting servers?
When you share a server, your options are pre-selected. Different users on the same server may have different needs, but users cannot choose different configurations because servers can only come with a single configuration.
Why should we prefer our own server?
When we have our own server, we are now in a position to set it up just the way we like it, including things like processor speed, RAM, storage capacity, and software. This solution is simply much more customizable.
Is dedicated server hosting just for the huge sites?
Once you graduate, or need to graduate to dedicated servers, there are several levels within this category, where you can choose small, medium, large, or very large depending on your needs. Your sites only need to be big enough to reach the entry level.
Is dedicated server hosting worth the extra money?
If you could benefit from dedicated servers, this doesn’t cost you money, it makes you money, as long as you actually stand to benefit from the way that this top-level service significantly upgrades everything. Making more money is definitely worth spending more on.
How important is it to choose the right dedicated hosting company?
Just like with everything else, there is considerable variance in quality among market participants in the website hosting business. There are a lot of choices out there, the decent, the good, and the great, and going with the great is a great deal better than choosing merely decent or good.
How important is getting advice from independent experts such as BetterHost.com?
People will often just check out just one or a few providers, maybe one they have heard about or seen an ad for. All these sites are naturally going to trumpet themselves, so you need to get advice from someone who has the knowledge to recommend but are not biased by having a stake in your choice.