How important is a dedicated server?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Gambetta: Following
  
  
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  Harley Helmer: Dedicated servers will never be bogged down due to other sites traffic or resource needs. It also eliminates the additional security risk. On shared hosting, all the other sites on the server are a potential security risk for yours.
  
  
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  Rudolf Ladyzhenskii: Dedicated server will, generally, have more resources available to your site. But it is more expensive and need someone to manage it
  
  
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  Zachary Toto: It`s more a matter of what kind of site you`re developing. Your average blog, for example, will be fine on shared hosting. Something like an online game, or massive amounts of traffic is going to need a dedicated server.
  
  
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  Stephen Kaufman: First, what type of site?
  
  
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  Neil Cheesman: Stephen Kaufman It was more of a general question but say for one site that gets no more than 100 visits a day and another that gets 4000 a day and has Woocommerce on it.
  
  
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  Stephen Kaufman: Neil Cheesman i meant like manual build or wordpress?
  
  if it’s wp, you can save by going with a shared host built for wp like siteground. I used to manually build sites and had a dds with knownhost, ran great, but when i started building wp sites, their hosting was terrible. I switched to siteground and ended up gaining 20 points on google psi from the switch alone.
  
  Once I added wp-rocket and their cdn, i’m at near perfect scores.
  
  So dds isn’t necessary, but the right hosting can be.
  
  
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  Neil Cheesman: Stephen Kaufman WP - Long gone are the days when I used Dreamweaver and expression web - although they were far less bloated than most of the Wordpress sites.
  
  
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  Stephen Kaufman: Neil Cheesman i’m with you bro, you end up with a smoother load, it just takes 20 times longer to build manually lol. I have had good success using siteground, wp-rocket, elementor and aastra though.
  
  
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  Neil Cheesman: Stephen Kaufman Thanks for the info... can aastra be used with Classic or Gutenberg?
  
  
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  Stephen Kaufman: Neil Cheesman yes with either but easier with elementor or gutenburg as your block builder
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Shared hosting, especially on a cloud, is effectively what any CDN is anyway. It normally shouldn`t matter, but there are (exceptionally rare) exceptions, such as when a shared host is privately owned and used for a lot of malicious activity.
  
  There are some advantages to a dedicated server where you want to do some advanced server-level setup, install certain stuff, etc, that change how the server works/runs. Other than that, you`re generally better with cloud hosting since it generally has less downtime, is more robust, etc.
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: If you go with a dedicated server, plan on replacing it every 3-4 years. For a truly busy site or portfolio, you may need to change servers every 2-3 years.
  
  
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  Neil Cheesman: Michael Martinez Are most/many of `cloud` servers now? I think Siteground is.. (but may be wrong) - Does this `cloud` simply mean that a website pulls its resources from a range of servers rather than just one?
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: Neil Cheesman A dedicated server can run "cloud software" but it`s not "in the cloud" if it isn`t part of a system of cloud resources. The "cloud" breaks up services (and sometimes data and apps) across multiple servers.
  
  Shared Web hosting companies sometimes use cloud systems to distribute the load for their clients, but that`s not the same thing as putting everyone "into the cloud".
  
  A Web hosting company might build its service in the cloud but to the clients the system looks like real hard servers (they`re running on virtual servers).
  
  Now, all THAT said, there is an operating system called CloudLinux that many hosting providers use. It`s a clever name but based on what I understand it does (manage user account limits and resources), it`s not really "the cloud".
  
  
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  Neil Cheesman: Michael Martinez Many thanks Michael for the detailed explanation. My own site - which gets about 8-10K visitors a day seems to be ranking and performing okay (little downtime) apart from the issues this week with Siteground - I am still not happy that they have chosen to not contact customers at all about. I also think that they had a similar issue earlier this year - a few weeks or months ago as I had a similar issue with GSC and not indexing error - I mentioned this on Siteground chat and they implied the same. That said, I earn from the site and as the saying goes ` if it ain`t broke` don`t fix it`.But... My partner`s pet portrait website has `suffered` for quite some time and maybe worth a change in hosting. Quite a small website with little traffic - little especially due to not ranking high. So looking at getting some SEO and design and possibly looking at WPX for the hosting.
  
  
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  Jim Munro: Neil Cheesman I saw this:
  
  
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  Jim Munro: sorry my sharing was way off. I`ll look for the original
  
  
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  Perry Bernard: I have used only ‘cloud container’ hosting for years now. Isolated instances with dedicated php version installs, fast enough and never affected by anyone else’s site. Now whether or not that is one isolated machine or not i have no idea.
  
  
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  Jeff Ferguson: Like a few things in SEO, it’s not so much the hosting itself, but what the hosting can cause. Google doesn’t have any ranking signals for shared or dedicated servers; however, shared servers can sometimes introduce other problems that cause problems that are ranking signals, such as page speed, etc.