Business owners have asked me "do I need a server for my website?" in the sense that they would have a server in their office to store their website files instead of hosting their website file on a shared hosting account through a web-hosting company.
The answer is no. I used to work for a guy who used to sucker companies into purchasing servers just to hold their website. Servers cost thousands of dollars plus thousands more, per year, to maintain. You need a server tech to check the server once in a while and make sure the software gets upgraded for security and comparability purposed. It's a complete waste of money unless your server holds valuable data like customer credit card information. Even if your server contains company credit card information, you can trust popular web hosting companies to manage a dedicated or secure SSL server for you.
Here is a list of 10 large companies that use Godaddy services
- woothemes.com
- proboards.com
- stackoverflow.com
- alot.com
- wowhead.com
- xkcd.com
- seriesyonkis.com
- exoclick.com
- flipkart.com
- goodreads.com
- twitpic.com
- babylon.com
- bytes.com
- opera.com
- foursquare.com
- r7.com
- thechive.com
- realclearpolitics.com
- yousendit.com
- dreamstime.com
Use the BBB (Better Business burea ) website to check the stability of your potential hosting company.
I've worked as a web developer/web master for about seven different companies and the worst experiences I've had was working on self hosted servers run by companies that employed a server tech to maintain their system. For some reason, the servers always had outdated settings, and outdated software. Perhaps the temptation for the network administrator to use old software while pocketing the saving is too tempting. It's not like a company owner has any idea on whether his server is up to date or not, unlike hosting companies that have multiple people making sure things are up to par.
Chances are a popular web hosting company will better keep your dedicated server up to date and more secure than if you were to pay for your own server and network administrator.
