How To Know If You Need a Dedicated Server?

A dedicated server is an Internet-connected computer devoted entirely to one customer. As your Web site grows, you may begin to wonder whether you need a dedicated server. There are indicators that your Website need a dedicated server. Often these factors drive the decision to move to a dedicated server.

Signs You’re Ready for a Dedicated Server:

Performance a slowdown in site performance. This factor could signal another issue, like buggy PHP or CGI coding. Once you’ve ruled out the alternatives, here are some signs you may have outgrown your shared Web hosting plan.

Page loading times increasing

Database requests are causing error messages

Pages taking too long to server and timeout because the server is overloaded

To see if you have any of these problems, monitor your Web site traffic and visit your site at peak traffic times. You should experience any performance issues yourself. You can also check your error logs to discover what problems visitors encounter.

Your Server-side Software Needs Have Increased

Customization is the most compelling reason to move to a dedicated server. Shared Web hosting plans include a defined list of software, but you must wait for the Web host to add an updated version because the change affects every Web site on the server, not just yours. Upgrading and adding new software can cause downtime, so it’s not fair to the other sites on the server if your host makes those changes just for you. A dedicated server is all yours, so you can install any software you want.

Technical Know-how

Your Website may be ready for a dedicated server, but careful integration with new server is important and should not be done by a novice.   Upgrading software along with the latest security patches is are where many make mistakes and cause delays and lost data.   You should consider a managed plan such as offered by MVIsolutions.

You can get a managed dedicated server and pay MVIsolutions to take care of these requests. Our thoughts are as follows.

If you are a small business with relatively simple hosting operations, then don’t ignore dedicated servers.  I know the pressure from customers to use the cloud is powerful, but that’s because they only see the marketing hype. The reality is that a dedicated server, properly managed, will generally provide greater performance and reliability at lower costs than current cloud service options.

Reasons Why You Should Use Dedicated Over Cloud Hosting

Performance

We find that dedicated servers offer the best performance over cloud – especially on a per-dollar basis.  MVI has used Rackspace, Softlayer, and AWS.  None can deliver the power of a properly configured dedicated server. This is especially true when it comes to disk IO.  With most cloud systems, the network and underlying storage are shared among customers. This can cause disk I/O to be unpredictable.   If another customer starts to send large amounts of write requests to the storage array, you may see slowdowns.  The upstream network is shared so you can experience bottlenecks there too.

Clearness

When debugging performance issues, clearness is key.  Clearness is why we are fans of NewRelic.  NewRelic allows you to peer inside of your application and find the bottlenecks.  This clearness is key to solving complicated performance and reliability issues.  With many cloud vendors, you cannot peek behind the curtain to see what is really powering your operations.  Cloud services often obscure hardware and network problems.  As a shared service, cloud suffers from two key issues that you typically do not occur with dedicated servers.  With the cloud, you share resources with others.  This includes disk, RAM, CPU, and network.   Cloud software attempts to fence in your neighbors, but the fence has holes.  Often due to inherent design or more often configuration choices, a single user can overwhelm a local compute node.  This can result in temporary outages and performance issues for your operations that have nothing to do with you