Hosting is cheap these days: a shared hosting plan can be under ten dollars while there’s plenty of inexpensive dedicated server plans on offer. If your web sites have become popular, it might be time to consider migrating to a dedicated server. Not preparing for such an eventuality might cost you dearly as even so-called unlimited hosting plans will shut your account down if your sites swallow up too much of a shared server’s resources and bandwidth.
Increasing traffic isn’t the only reason for choosing dedicated over shared. Other motives might be to avoid the disruptions that others sharing the same server may cause through such things as their own sites’ popularity or inefficient scripts. If your web site isn’t up 24-7, you’re losing customers! Also, if you need to install your own applications, not just scripts, shared hosting does not offer that luxury. Of course, dedicated isn’t the only alternative either. Some choose to move to a VPS, or Virtual Private Server, which provides most of the advantages of a dedicated except that you’re still technically sharing a server. VPS is a good option, and puts a “wall” around your sites, but if a simulated dedicated server is not your bag and you want an entire machine under your control, just go dedicated!
That said, not all dedicated servers are created equal! Be weary of the exceedingly cheap deals, as most likely the machine you get will have a weak or old CPU (I’ve even seen some with an Intel Atom!), a single ip address, low ram, a smaller than normal hard disk, and a 10 Mbps Ethernet card instead of 100 Mpbs, thereby limiting your bandwidth at any given moment in time. The trick hosting companies use is to charge extra for features that usually come included with more expensive plans, even for such basic things such as CPANEL or other graphical server management software, so when you add-up all the extras, you might not have such a great deal after all! Most dedicated servers come with a free version of Linux as the operating system, usually Ubuntu or Cent OS, and that’s absolutely fine unless you really need a Windows server, in which case your plan will cost more by virtue of Windows not being free.
If you can afford it, the better dedicated servers usually are the $200 + a month range. You could also do what’s known as a co-lo (co-location) where you provide the server and the hosting service charges you for the rack space and the bandwidth, but a properly equipped server might set you back several thousand dollars, and you’ll have to configure it yourself, which is fine if you’re an ubergeek, not so much if you’re just a regular Joe! Another thing to be mindful of is how reliable is the staff minding the data center at the hosting company. Most companies provide you with a means to remotely cold reboot your server, but if that fails, for example because of a hardware failure (even just a disconnected cable), you don’t want to be waiting hours for their geeks to go and have a look at it. You can usually find out a lot about a hosting service’s reputation by googling their name. Their customers will usually sound off in the many tech forums if they had any difficulties.
Finally, before you migrate your sites to any new location, whether dedicated, VPS or just shared, avoid disruptions by having a moving plan. The usual method is to first duplicate your content and configuration on the new server first, testing with sub-domains of the originals (Ex: new.mysite.com) and when everything appears to be in order, only then switch the dns information to the new ips. Don’t cancel your original hosting plan yet, as the dns changes will take time to propagate and thus a lot of visitors will still land at the old location. I would still keep the original alive for a week or so in case you forgot something, though keeping copies of everything on your local PC or in the Cloud somewhere should be part of any serious moving plan. Note that logs and any dynamic data will likely be out of synch, and while there are ways to avoid minimizing data loss, such precautions are likely to be beyond the skills of most users.
Happy dedicating!
