Back in December I posted this feedback article, wanting to know just how much traffic warranted a jump to a dedicated server. Actually, I was just chomping at the bit to put my site on a new box after browsing inexpensive dedicated servers, and I had become tired of excessive resource usage shutdowns and increasingly bad performance from my old shared account.

In February I migrated my site and a friend’s to a Dual Core Pentium D 3.0 with 2 gigs of ram and a 250 gig hard drive. Not bleeding edge by any stretch, but plenty of machine for http usage, and the price was right. My site traffic actually never warranted a jump, being a somewhat low traffic niche site, but I wanted my own box to administer and my friend’s site was taking off. He was seeing up to 10,000 uniques/day, and his poor shared hosting account was constantly down because of excessive resource usage.

Unfortunately for me, around the same time they started to enforce the computers in the workplace policy where I work, and I went from being able to sink nearly all day every day into my web endeavors to only having time to work on the web on my weekends. Needless to say, this hasn’t been good for my site, and I am unable to come up with creative ways to work time in for it, because there simply isn’t any. I am not going to sacrifice my family to work on this stuff, and I am not going to screw up a day job where I’ll eventually make six figures and walk away with a pension. So, with my site currently in the tank, I am giving up my server and putting my site back on shared hosting. I am not killing the site, and I keep telling myself that I’ll get back on track, but a grim resignation has set in that I will never be able to build it into what I had dreamed it could be.

That said, here are some observations about dedicated servers for those of you who may be thinking about one:

1. A shared host will sustain the traffic that most people will get My box, running two sites and seeing up to 400 simultaneous users, never broke a sweat.
   

   $ uptime
   4:48PM up 60 days, 13:20, 1 user, load averages: 0.08, 0.25, 0.29

   See what I mean? Even when the box was getting hammered because my friend’s site got mentioned on some mainstream news site, I never saw the memory usage exceed 30%.

2. You will be on your own Unless you have mad unix skillz you will be clueless about what is happening on your box. Only the uber buck, top dollar dedicateds are managed, meaning that you will be the sysadmin on your box. If you know your way around a unix system this won’t be too daunting, but if you are coming from the windows world you will be in for a crash course of unix system administration 101. I’ve always been a unix user so it didn’t pose too many challenges for me, but I will tell you that I never had control of a box that was open to the world and all that entails, like….
3. Every script kiddie and hacker out there is trying to get in I’m a savvy enough unix guy that I could spot all the attempts made to compromise my box. This happens pretty much all day every day. Malicious poltergeists are either trying to break in to wreak havoc, or diabolical black hats want my system for a spam server. If you aren’t a skilled unix user-admin, this will be a problem for you, one you probably won’t even realize is going on. This is where I tell you to either stay with shared or, if your unix skills are up to snuff, use a secure os like FreeBSD or OpenBSD. I won’t argue with you linux guys about the virtues of linux vs. the BSDs. This is my article, and I have 14 years of unix experience that tells me that A) BSD is more secure than linux, and B) BSD uses less resources and serves pages faster than linux.
4. Dedicated servers aren’t necessarily faster than shared You’re thinking that dedicated box will be lightning fast with just a site or two on it, right? Well, all that depends on what kind of pipe your host has that box on. Your server’s description may have said 100mbit, or you may be paying $20/month to be on a 100mbit switch, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that your host is generously giving your box it’s own 100mbit pipe to the internet. They’re in business to make a buck, and it’s more than likely that your budget server is sitting on a 10mbit switch with God knows how many other servers. You guys are sharing bandwidth, so you may be surprised to find that your new box doesn’t move any faster than your old $7/month shared account.

So, I pretty much shot down the whole dedicated server thing, huh? No way. Remember, all hosts are different. There are assuredly hosts out there that offer a sub-$100/month box that is lightning fast. Like everything else, you just have to find it. Dedicated has it’s perks all right. You will never, ever see that dreaded excessive resource shutdown message. It’s nice having the resources to do anything you want. One box will fulfill all of your web ambitions (unless they all take off).

My recommendation for dedicated after 5 months with the one I’ve been using: It doesn’t take a lot of box to run even a busy website. Even a $49/month Celeron will do nicely for most people, provided you throw a couple gigs of ram at it. Remember, web servers need memory first, fast hard drives second, cpu speed third. A couple gigs of ram will be enough for most, and you can always add more. Given the choice between a 75 gig SCSI drive and a 350 gig ATA, take the SCSI. Speed trumps storage for a web server. As for cpus, dual core is nice, and what you think is a slow dual core cpu is still a fast chip for serving web pages. Remember, the demands of a box serving web pages are different than the demands of a workstation that you’ll be playing games on. It takes a lot more muscle to satisfy you gamers than it does to serve web pages.

So, I’m slinking back to shared hosting to save money while my site is in limbo. Hopefully I was able to pass on some useful advice to those of you who are on the fence about dedicateds, and hopefully my fortunes will reverse and I’ll get my web time back and need a dedicated box again. Not all hosts are equal. Some shared hosting is a joke, and some rivals having your own box. The same goes for dedicated, some hosts are much better than others. For more info, check out Web Hosting Talk, the best resource for info on hosting.

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