Quote:
Originally Posted by davejog
tbh, is there any advantage at all in dedicated apart from the obvious (only you can crash your server, more resources)?
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The most obvious benefits to dedicated are of course you have
exclusive control to what is uploaded, and what consumes your bandwidth, RAM, SQL, etc ... The more chefs in the kitchen, the more potential for disaster.
Lets say a server has 3.6Ghz dual processors, 73gb X 2 SCSI hard drives w/ software raid, and 6GB of RAM (typical configuration for one of my virtual shared servers, and also a popular dedicated too!) ... If you are the sole tenant of this rig (dedicated), you are going to be able to abuse the fuck outta it, and see very little effect on pageloads ... but this is going to cost you at least $149 a month, plus additional storage (if needed), additional bandwidth, RAM, or other custom configurations.
If you are on a Virtual Private Server (VPS), you share the processor and hard drive -- partitioned amongst a small number of users, each with their own
dedicated RAM, Apache, SQL, exim, dovecot, PHP, perl, cgi etc ... (I typically limit VPS to 4 per machine), then you get most of the same benefits of a dedicated server, but on a slightly smaller scale, and the costs of the hardware are shared amongst the (4 in A1 Web Solutions' case) users, resulting in a substantial savings as compared to full dedicated, while sharing many of the benefits which make dedicated hosting so attractive. My VPS packages start as low as $59.95 a month.
The last and often most popular option for budget-conscious webmasters is
shared virtual hosting, where you have as many as 40 clients pooling all the resources of the server, each with their own user control panel, and FTP.
Accounts vary in size and resources, and (at A1 Web Solutions) start at $9.95 a month (for 25GB of transfer, and 1500GB storage), and can go up to around $100 a month. Usually once a clients needs are such that they are spending this much with virtual shared hosting, it is worth their while to select a VPS or dedicated account to facilitate their future growth.
So now for the short answer to your original question : If you are ever on a shared server with somebody who has 3 concurrent HUN listings, and a whole network of SQL driven wordpress blogs/splogs, the benefits of a dedicated machine will become
very obvious!
My door (or my PM/IM) is always open Davejog if you have any more questions -- fell free to hit me up
Cheers
FF