What Is Dedicated Hosting?

Dedicated hosting typically costs more per month than shared hosting or VPS hosting. What the extra money buys is the whole machine: every CPU core and every gigabyte of RAM serves your sites alone, with no other customers competing for them.

How dedicated hosting works

The provider owns a physical server, racks it in its own data center, and leases you the entire machine, usually month to month. The provider keeps the hardware, power, and network running. Depending on the provider and plan, you may get root access and a choice from supported operating systems, so check both before you buy. DreamHost's dedicated servers, for example, run Ubuntu Linux.

As of July 2026, the entry configuration on DreamHost's dedicated plans is a 6-core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 480 GB of SSD storage. All of that capacity serves your sites and nobody else's.

Managed vs. unmanaged plans

On an unmanaged plan, you're the system administrator: operating system patches, security hardening, monitoring, and backups are all yours. On a managed plan, the provider handles server upkeep, monitoring, and support, and charges more per month for the labor. DreamHost Dedicated hosting is fully managed and still includes full root and shell access, so you keep command-line control without being the one on call at 3 a.m.

Dedicated vs. shared, VPS, and cloud hosting

Four hosting models, one deciding question: how much of the machine is yours?

• Shared hosting: many customers' sites run on one server and split its resources. Cheapest, with the least control.
• VPS hosting: an isolated virtual server on shared physical hardware. Resource guarantees and root access depend on the plan.
• Cloud hosting: workloads spread across pooled machines that scale up or down on demand.
• Dedicated hosting: one entire physical machine, a dedicated server, reserved for one customer.

For a closer look at the most common upgrade decision, read VPS vs. Dedicated Hosting (4 Key Differences) on the DreamHost blog.

What dedicated hosting costs

Dedicated hosting is quoted as a monthly price, and that price tracks both the hardware and the labor behind it. Four things move it: the number of CPU cores, the amount of RAM, the size and type of storage, and whether the plan is managed or unmanaged. Add-ons such as extra IP addresses or a larger bandwidth allowance push it higher still. A modest configuration sits at the bottom of a provider's range, and a high-core-count machine with hundreds of gigabytes of RAM sits at the top. Published prices change often, so check the DreamHost Dedicated hosting page for current plans rather than trusting a number in an article.

Trade-offs and failure modes

The advantage of single-tenant hardware is isolation from other tenants. Nobody else's site competes for the machine's CPU and memory, and there's no co-tenant whose compromised site could expose yours. That isolation has limits: it doesn't shield you from network congestion, a compromise of the provider's own systems, or attacks aimed directly at your server. How safe the machine is still depends on how it's configured and patched, and a neglected dedicated server can be less secure than well-run shared hosting. The other trade-offs are worth naming:

• On an unmanaged plan, you're the sysadmin, and a missed security patch is your breach. The fix: pick a managed plan, or set up automatic updates and monitoring on day one.
• A single dedicated server is a single point of failure unless you add redundancy, such as a second server or a failover setup. Cloud platforms can make replication and failover easier to set up, but availability on any model depends on how the workload is architected. Keep off-server backups so a failed drive is an interruption, not a loss.
• Scaling up a single dedicated server usually means migrating to a bigger machine, and the cutover can cause downtime unless you've built in redundancy or a planned failover path. There's no resource slider to drag.
• Capacity you don't use is money spent on idle hardware. If your load fits comfortably on a VPS, a whole server is wasted spend.

When to choose dedicated hosting

Choose dedicated hosting when a maxed-out VPS plan still shows sustained high CPU or RAM use, when you run resource-heavy applications such as large databases or busy stores, or when compliance or isolation requirements call for single-tenant hardware. If none of that describes your site, stay on web hosting or a VPS: most sites never need a whole machine.

If yours does, DreamHost Dedicated hosting is the next step up, and The Complete Dedicated Hosting Buyer's Guide covers how to size a configuration before you buy.