Quick Guide to Buy Dedicated Server Hosting

Everyone has seen unmanaged dedicated servers for $59 and up. If you don’t care about performance, security, uptime, support and ratings/reviews, or you’re one of those people who goes to Las Vegas and bets on snake-eyes being rolled each throw of the dice… then feel free to take your chances with one of those cheap hosting vendors. We won’t recommend it – but hey, your company, your website, your decision.

In the real world, most people demand a certain level of those other factors, because if their website is down, slow, or has issues – it costs companies money – sometimes tons of money. When your website pays the bills, you MUST have it performing well, secured from hackers, online 99.9%+ of the time and supported 24×7.

Buying dedicated server hosting means paying a reasonable price for a high quality service. That typically means something in the range of $150 to $350 per month, depending on the hardware/network specifications.

Performance means much more than pure hardware specifications. More CPU, more RAM, more network transfer, and faster port speeds are part of the equation. However, performance isn’t just having X amount of drive space. It’s what type of drive and how it’s configured as well (SSD vs HDD, RAID vs non-RAID, NAS/SAN vs local SSD RAID, etc). Hardware RAID vs software RAID can make massive performance differences.

Performance choices are pretty straightforward. BUT… some hosts use cheap or old hardware, which may initially sound like great specifications – but end up being slower and more likely to have failures that introduce downtime. The same is true of networking. Premium backbone networking, alongside multiple redundant routes, is one mammoth differentiator among hosting providers. You’re unlikely to be getting premium anything for $59 a month. At $159 a month, you can get premium, redundant, networking with premium, dependable high-performance hardware.

Remember, sometimes low priced offers don’t include hardware upgrades, free control panel choices, backup systems, optimizations or configurations, which undoubtedly can take the price up from the starting offer price. Certainly, budget hosting companies won’t give you a chance to choose premium hardware OR networking.

Having personally been a victim of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (having my site hacked because a different site was first hacked on a server, and it then enabled my site to be attacked easily), I am very familiar with what it feels like to buy cheap hosting that’s poorly secured.

Knowing how to install server software is one thing – just about anyone can do it with a few clicks and selecting options like timezone. Knowing how to configure server the underlying operating system and then how to configure all the instances of sites running on a server SECURELY, is quite a different matter entirely. With many budget hosting companies, it’s one or two guys working out of their basement office, using hardware from other companies, house in datacenters they’ve never visited. A quality, dependable provider has teams of software engineers who spend their entire day installing, testing and assessing various configuration options to get the best performance possible, securely.

Sometimes things don’t go perfect – there can be issues that need resolved, which is life. On those occasions, you shouldn’t settle for anything less than 24x7x365 technical support. You shouldn’t settle for anything longer than a 10 minute initial response time. You shouldn’t have to deal with half a dozen people because one department or one person isn’t skilled enough to handle your issue. You shouldn’t get charged because something went wrong.

Technical support is critical. Quality technical support is what separates cheap companies from good ones. When you buy dedicated server hardware (rent it monthly actually), you shouldn’t have to be a super-geek yourself. As a business owner, or website manager, or marketing/design agency, you need to focus your time on acquiring new customers, servicing existing ones and delivering great service to those who need it. You shouldn’t be trying to figure out linux error codes, php resource errors, or defragging a database in hopes of curing some technical issue.

Enter Fully Managed Services! Unmanaged hosting leaves you to become the supergeek. Fully managed hosting, means that there’s a team of top notch technical wizards who pre-configure things properly so as to avoid errors much of the time. They also install components that can automatically renew and apply SSL cert renewals, apply updates to software without needing a reboot, or expand your available RAM/drive space without needing to migrate you to another machine or change your IP address.

Conclusions

When it’s time to buy dedicated servers, rent them, lease them, or just add more to your existing stock, make sure you balance your need to save money with what you’ll save by choosing quality managed dedicated server hosting. Key criteria include:

Price
Performance
Security
Uptime
Support
Reviews