| If
you do under 1,000 gigs of monthly transfer,
don't be fooled into upgrading to a dedicated
account for the wrong reasons. Be sure to
educate yourself on the true pros and cons
of a dedicated server vs. a good virtual account.
A dedicated server is not always the best
options. Jeff explains what to consider... |
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Looking for a fast and affordable dedicated server hosting solution? Visit Marlin Web Hosting
and get new special rates on bandwidth!
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Over the last 2 years, an emphasis has been placed
on large adult sites to upgrade from Virtual Servers
to Dedicated servers to obtain increased reliability
and more importantly, a boost in speed. Is this idea
true or is this the work of the marketing department
of hosting companies to sell the more lucrative dedicated
server accounts?
The value of a dedicated server highly depends on
the size of the adult site and the hosting provider.
An adult site pushing 1000 gigs of bandwidth per month
or more should not consider a virtual server account
due to the possibility of overloading the server. Sites
under 1000 gigs are a different story however, and could
even benefit from a Virtual Server in many ways.
For hosting clients with below 100 gigs of monthly
transfer, a dedicated server would be a simple waste
of money. This article is meant to target sites between
100 gigs and 1000 gigs of transfer to help webmasters
make a decision whether to make the jump to a dedicated
server or stick with a high performance virtual server
account. However, lower transfer sites will also do
well in reading this article. A Virtual Server account
that is acceptable to a 400 gig/month site would also
be acceptable to a 100 gig/month site.
| A host is not going to invest
$1000 to $3000 for a commercial Operating System
such as Sun or BSDI plus $3000 to $6000 hardware
costs for your dedicated server. However, for a
Virtual Server, where many of their customers rely
on one machine, the expense is worth it. |
Picking a host for a virtual server is far harder than
picking a host for a dedicated server. Pressuring hosts
to release information about their Virtual Server hardware
and software is very important.
Some hosting companies provide superb dedicated servers
but provide barely acceptable to shoddy virtual server
accounts. Do your best to avoid these companies. The
best way to tell whether a hosting company can provide
you with an adequate virtual server account is to straight
up ask them. If they seem hesitant to put your 400 gig/month
site on a virtual server, don’t try to force them,
just move on. Read on for more information on picking
the right provider.
The first and most important reason to consider a
virtual server account is the possibility of lower per-gig
rates. Although it will take some negotiation, it is
possible to get the same per-gig rates on a 400 gig
virtual server account as you would on a 400 gig dedicated
server account, but without the high setup fees. In
fact, a hosting provider should be able to give you
cheaper rates on a virtual server because of the lack
of the need for an equipment purchase.
The second reason (one that could make a virtual server
more valuable) is the use of commercial Operating Systems
on Virtual Servers as opposed to freely distributed
Operating Systems such as Linux and FreeBSD. A host
is not going to invest $1000 to $3000 for a commercial
Operating System such as Sun or BSDI plus $3000 to $6000
hardware costs for your dedicated server. However, for
a Virtual Server, where many of their customers rely
on one machine, the expense is worth it. Therefore,
find a host that runs a commercial Operating System.
The advantages to a commercial Operating System are
numerous. They are supported and programmed by organized
teams and are less prone to Bugs. They are also programmed
with System Administrators in mind and make it easier
for the host to debug problems on the server. Hosts
that invest in commercial operating systems will also
invest in hardware that the OSs are meant to run on.
This is like Apple OS vs Microsoft OS; Apple is far
superior as it is programmed specifically for the type
of hardware it runs on instead of trying to provide
for hundreds of different manufacturers.
The most important advantage of a commercial operating
system is its near immunity to hackers. Linux and FreeBSD
provide source code to the entire Internet community
in which hackers go through line by line looking for
flaws. Since commercial operating systems do not provide
their source code, it is more than 100 times harder
for a hacker to find flaws. A hacker getting into a
website can mean a major disruption in revenue.
Besides the use of specific hardware for the operating
system, virtual servers often are run on hardware far
superior to dedicated servers. Again, since the host
must maintain many customers on one piece of hardware,
they will make an effort to limit any possible downtime.
This means redundant processors, redundant Ethernet
connections, tape backups, and most importantly redundant
hard drives.
Hosting providers build servers with redundant hard
drives with the use of RAID technology. RAID uses two
or more hard drives to act as one. This means if a hard
drive fails, the server will not go down and there will
be no data loss; the provider just comes in and replaces
the dead hard drive and noone even notices. While a
dedicated server will rarely make use of RAID –
except where the webmaster ponies up the $1000+ to implement
it – virtual servers will run RAID more than 50%
of the time, especially on the more reputable hosting
companies.
Because of the increased speed of hardware in the
industry today, concerns about a provider overloading
a server with too many customers is less than it was
3 years. Web page serving is only 5% to 10% more processor
heavy than it was 3 years ago whereas processor power
has increased by over 400%. Add to that fact that hard
drives have increased in size and speed, it becomes
harder and harder to overload a server.
The idea that a dedicated server provides faster loading
time is also dependant on the host’s performance.
A well managed server handling virtual server accounts
will load your site as quickly as any dedicated server.
In fact, BSDI and especially Sun Servers are well known
for providing faster web service than Linux and FreeBSD.
There is also the possibility of using commercial web
servers such as Zeus instead of Apache, although I don’t
see this as much of an advantage because of the lack
of flexibility, though Zeus is admittedly faster than
Apache.
| Don’t rule out the
possibility of a virtual server because of what
you’ve read on a resource board or chat forum.
Consider the advantages and make a decision based
on your situation and whether or not you are willing
to search many hosting providers for the right account. |
There are some disadvantages to Virtual Servers. The
main disadvantage is that other websites on your server
could cause problems that load down the server, unfortunately
slowing your site down. This is not the same thing as
overloading a server. In this case, an inept programmer
writes a script that cannot possibly be handled by any
web server. However, good hosting companies will keep
this sort of thing in check by various monitoring. These
companies will not let one customer cause them to lose
10 others. In my experience, this situation is very
rare. On my hosting service, I will deny access to scripts
that slow down the server noticeably.
The only other disadvantage to virtual servers is
the lack of storage space.
Although I’m not speaking from any actual facts,
I would wager that if a large number Virtual Server
Accounts hosted on BSDI or Sun Servers were put against
a large number of dedicated accounts hosted on Linux
or FreeBSD servers, the Virtual Server accounts would
have an overall better uptime percentage.
In summary, don’t rule out the possibility of
a virtual server because of what you’ve read on
a resource board or chat forum. Consider the advantages
and make a decision based on your situation and whether
or not you are willing to search many hosting providers
for the right account. If you do decide to go with a
Virtual Account, make sure you will be hosted on an
operating system and hardware like I describe above,
otherwise, you will lose the advantages I laid out in
this article.
As I’ve said before in many articles, “Choosing
your provider could be your most important decision.”
If you read this article and would benefit by the information,
please consider my hosting service: http://www.xxxstorage.com.
My Virtual Servers run Dual processors, dual redundant
RAID systems, and the BSDI operating system. Here is
my uptime information for my two most heavily loaded
servers. Each has at least 30 customers and is doing
between 1000 and 2000 gigs of traffic. This information
can be obtained on most Unix servers by typing ‘uptime’
on the command line:
5:31PM up 251 days, 15:39, 3 users, load averages: 0.53,
0.97, 0.80
5:31PM up 169 days, 23:47, 2 users, load averages: 0.18,
0.24, 0.30
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Jeff has been in the business since 1997. He is the President of Pulse Web Ventures, which owns many sites catering to both surfers and webmasters. These include Webmaster Joint, as well as XXX Storage, one of the Net's top web hosts. Feel free to Contact Him if you have any questions. |
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