MBA1490 Q&A Wednesday: Do I need to have a dedicated server for my website?

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast and get straight to it with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and a Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Russ and Russ asks do I need a dedicated server for my website? It's a great question from Russ and I decided to record this episode and give this answer because yesterday we talked about hiring a website manager. Now if you're not sure what Rust means by a dedicated server, well most of us when we host our websites or whether we have a WordPress website and we're hosting with let's say WP Engine or Hostgator or we have a website like on Squarespace or Weebly, the vast majority of them are hosted on shared servers. That means you are sharing the server, the cloud computer that hosts your website with other websites. Think of it like your website's an app on your phone and there are other apps running on your phone. At the same time, a dedicated server means that your website is the only website on on a server. What are the advantages, the disadvantages? How much does it cost and is it really worth it? Do you need to be on a dedicated server? We're going to break it all down in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Before I begin, I want to emphasize the fact that your website is one of the biggest assets in your business. It's where business is done, is where people find out about you. It's where they learn if they want to do business with you. It's where they buy things from you. It's where they consume your content. In the online world, it's like your shop. So investing in your website is probably one of the best investments you can make. Now I'm going to explain if you actually need a dedicated server for your business. I'm going to talk about the different stages of business. Maybe you're not there yet. Maybe you will upgrade to a dedicated server later on. But how do you know when I'm going to get into all of that? First, a dedicated server is always going to be better than a shared server. There are so many advantages to it. Security advantages, bandwidth advantages, support advantages. I'll go through them all. But just to lay it out, let's start with the one disadvantage of a dedicated server. It's more expensive. That's really it. That's the only downside of having a dedicated server. Just to give you an idea, we have a dedicated server. We use a WP engine. It's the best hosting for WordPress sites. Their support is out of this world. It's the best in my opinion and I've tried a lot. So much so we partnered with them to give all our listeners an amazing discount. You could check that out over@100mba.net resources. There's a link right there and a code you can use to get 20% off your first payment. Whether it's an annual payment or a monthly payment, I wouldn't recommend it if we didn't use it. Now, our dedicated server, which allows up to a million visitors without a hiccup every single month, costs $600 a month. Yep, it's expensive. But because I have my own server, I can host all my websites on there. I can host my personal website, I can host my webinar ninja website, I can host my a hundred dollar MBA website and it's not gonna even bat an eye at that traffic because it's so powerful now. We used to be on a shared server on WP Engineering, but it actually became more cost effective for us to move to a dedicated server because we were paying $900 in overages every single month because of the traffic we were getting on the hundred dollar MBA because of this podcast. Good problem to have, but we totally didn't notice. We were about like two months in and we're like, wow, our overages are crazy. As the show was growing, our traffic was growing, so we realized we need to do something. So we actually messaged WP Engine's support and they said, hey, your traffic is quite high and you're sharing the server with other people. So we have to kind of slow down your bandwidth to be fair, with other people. And I'll explain what that means in a moment. It might be more cost effective for you to have a dedicated server, which cost $600, but that was cheaper. I was saving $300 a month by going with a dedicated server. So let's get into the advantages and the number one advantage is bandwidth. Now, when you're sharing a server with other people, which is a shared host, this is very common website hosting. You're sharing the bandwidth, the speed and the space on that server with other companies. So they're gonna basically monitor your speed and slow down your site if they have to, to accommodate, you know, your bandwidth. Meaning that they're gonna restrict your bandwidth, making your site a little slow and sluggish. It's like when you share a bowl of popcorn with your friends and one of your friends is grabbing handfuls of popcorn versus everybody's taking it one by one. So the shared server host is gonna say, I' that's not fair for everybody else. We're gonna limit your number of popcorns so that there's enough for everybody else. The other issue with a shared server is that sometimes this is rare, but it happens. Somebody on the shared server has an issue, has a bug, has a virus, something goes on and it takes down the whole server. So your server's totally down. You didn't do anything and neither did everybody else on that shared server. But one of the people had a problem, so therefore you all suffer. This is not common, but it can happen. It's happened to me in the past 10 years, but it's just something to keep in mind. The third advantage really is when you go to a dedicated server, whoever's supplying your servers, like WP Engine, they're going to give you a higher level. Support usually comes with a higher tier of support. You're going to get technical experts that can do the work for you. Like sometimes I'm having an issue with my website. I have a conflict with a plugin on WordPress. I'll go and say, hey, I'm having a bit of an issue. They go into my account and they actually just fix it for me. I don't have to do anything. They don't say, oh, it seems like there's a problem with this plugin. Maybe you want to try this? No, they don't do that. They just go ahead and they get it done for me and they say, okay, it's all good now because I'm paying a premium, right? And they value as a customer so they serve you in a higher level of service. Now when things go down, when things are not well, when your site is down, it's like code red, right? And, and you need fast responsive support. So this is really, really helpful. When there's a crisis on your website and you need to make sure it's solved as soon as possible. Even if it's just a few minutes, they're on your issue asap and usually you're back and running with no issues whatsoever in a few minutes. It's not that simple to solve some problems. If you're not on a dedicated server, sometimes all you need to do is reboot the server, you know, re spin the instance and because you're the only one on the server that's totally fine, you're down anyway. So rebooting it is just a quick solution. You can't reboot a shared server because everybody's going to go down. We're talking about hundreds of websites. So they got to find other ways to solve it, migrate you to a different server, it's a little bit of a mess. Now Russ, $600 is a lot of money and if you are not getting a lot of traffic, you may not see the roi. My advice is if you're just getting started, a shared server is fine. It'll get you started, it'll get the ball rolling. You need to, you don't need to spend a lot of money at the start, but once your website starts getting 100, 150,000 visitors a month and you can learn this from Google Analytics, you can go to similar web. It's a great website for you to check out how many visits a website gets and it's just a ballpark number. But the point here is, is that once you go over a hundred grand, I'd say a hundred grand. A hundred thousand visitors a month. It's time for you to consider choosing a dedicated server. Now, if you're getting that kind of traffic, your business should be rolling. You know, unless you have a conversion problem on your website, you're not converting all these visitors. And it's a good foundation to have a dedicated server. Once you get to that point, as you start growing beyond, you know, all these big websites, all these big blogs, they get millions of visitors a month. They all have dedicated servers because they know the value of uptime, of speed, of bandwidth, and they don't want to risk it and disappoint people that come to the website.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. To wrap up today's Q and A, Wednesday's question from Russ. Do I need a dedicated server for my website? I highly recommend you consider it once you get past the hundred thousand visitor mark. There's a lot of advant to it and I find that it's a great roi. The other thing you want to consider is that the faster your website is, and that has a lot to do with your hosting, the more likely you'll be ranked higher on Google. Google does prefer faster websites. If you want to know how fast your website is or you know how well your page loads, you can go to GT Metrics. It's a great little tool free online to check out your page speed and page insights by Google as well as another one. I remember testing out our page speeds before and after dedicated hosting and I realized, wow. Makes a huge difference. Of course, a lot of the way you optimize your website, the images, you know how much is being loaded on every page, that has a lot to do with your page speed. But those tools will actually show you.

What you can do to speed up your site.

Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. Thank you Russ for that amazing question on today's Q and A Wednesday. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar at 100- MBA. I'd be happy to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. And make sure you hit that subscribe button on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you're going to get access to over 1400 business lessons. Our archives. It's the only way to get access to the archives. It's absolutely free and all you got to do is hit that subscribe button on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Himalaya, or on them all. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of people spend money on Facebook ads, they spend money on sponsoring events and they spend money on other things, which is not a bad idea. But then they go skimpy. They go cheap on their website, which is something that's the backbone of your business that people are going to use every single day that powers everything you do. Don't go cheap on your website. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. See you then. Take care.

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