There are many people who wonder if there is any difference between a dedicated server and their home PC. This question will obviously arise for those considering own hosting from their home or office desktop. The hardware used in both cases could be similar though most dedicated servers will have significantly high specs. Though the home PC can be used as a server, it will not be able to deliver the same capabilities as a dedicated server. There is a notable difference in performance, capabilities and reliability. Comparing dedicated servers and home PCs when considering hosting options is similar comparing walking to driving. The main reasons is, even though you will get to your destination, one of the options will be less effective and inconvenient.

Essentially, home PCs are meant to be used as work stations to assist in working on projects either by an individual or by a number of people using it at different times. This means that most home PCs will have specs that support this kind of operation. Their design also allows accommodation of specific functions and applications. Dedicated servers on the other hand will normally come with very high specs and will be capable of taking on much greater workloads. They will also be more accommodating and easily scalable which makes them suitable for use in server hosting. This difference in capacity is the first significant advantage that dedicated servers have over home PCs. It means that the home PC will not be able to deliver the same quality of service as the dedicated server.

The other main difference besides the specs of the hardware used in home PCS and dedicated servers is the location of the machines. Mostly, a plesk dedicated server for example is located in a server room designed specifically for server hosting or in a data center. The server room or data centre provides sufficient security, power backup, temperature, bandwidth, controls and all other server requirements. This is to ensure that the people hosted on the server enjoy high quality and uninterrupted service. Most of these facilities are not liable to be found in a home PC. This therefore means that they experience frequent downtime and this leads to a lower quality service. The environment in which the dedicated server operates is one designed for high quality hosting.

Not many people will comfortably agree to have their websites hosted on a home PC. For anyone seriously looking to host anything substantial, this option is not viable. Its only use would be best for testing hosting services but not for anything else beyond that. Most home internet connections cannot handle the required bandwidth for effective hosting. All those trying to access sites hosted on your home PC will definitely get frustrated due to the slow connection to your server. There are many other differences between the two though most will relate to capabilities and functionalities of each. These differences are mostly contributed to by the environment in which the dedicated server and home PC work under.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.