I’m yet again shopping for a dedicated server. This one will house the membership area of DragNdropWebsites.com.

I’ve gone through this process so many times… it’s almost an art.

I thought perhaps I might share my experiences, as going through this for the first time can be quite a pain. Perhaps I can help you get one yourself with less pain than normally accompanys this process.

There are many, many options when it comes to getting your own dedicated server on the Web. The pricing structure is all over the map. You can find offers of dedicated servers for as little as $20 a month in some places. My first advice is to NOT shop solely on price.

I’ve gotten some really bad dedicated servers before. Not only that, but gotten servers in a hosting location that had traffic bottlenecks so bad that my sites appeared to be down for hours at a time, as anyone trying to load a page would exceed the timeout before getting served. These situations can be so bad that it’s more expensive to HAVE these servers than to not!

So avoid servers hosted with companies you’ve never heard of before, at crazy-low prices. You really do get what you pay for to a certain extent.

There are two ways to host a server on the Internet. You can either rent one, or buy one and have a company host it for you for a fee. Both types of dedicated servers have benefits and detriments.

If you rent a server, you are really “marrying” the host for an extended time. Moving from one host to another is one ginormous pain in the rear, so most people just stay with their host forever. It’s a long-term relationship, and you should consider that before buying.

The detriment is that you have to pay a pretty substantial rental fee every month from here on out. A relatively modern, feature-rich server is going to start at about $150 a month. Most of the servers I get are more in the range of $300 a month. Really beefy servers with lots of support services included start in the $500 per month range.

The benefits of renting a server are numerous. You have instant help if you ever have hardware problems. If the NIC card is starting to go out, the host will whip a new one into the machine immediately and at no charge to you. Most hosts guarantee either 99.9% or even 100% uptime. This means they guarantee your server to be up and running and online to the Internet at all times, or they start refunding fees. Also, if you ever decide to add more features, like another hard drive or more memory, it’s just a phonecall (and an addition to your monthly rental fee) away.

Buying your own dedicated server has real financial advantages. Right now, you can buy a pretty nice rackmount server for about $2,000. If you consider that you’ll be using this machine for years, the comparison to the monthly payment is pretty nice. This is particularly advantageous when you start to need a beefier machine.

For example, if you want to upgrade a rented server from 1GB RAM to 4GB RAM, you could easily tack another $50 per month on to your rental. Buying that much RAM for your owned server will cost you about $100 total. That’s a big difference.

The only ongoing fee you have to consider for your owned dedicated server is the cost of colocation. That’s what a hosting company is going to charge you monthly to house your server in their datacenter. This fee can be as little as $20 a month, but usually ends up more in the $50 to $100 per month range. They also guage this fee according to how much “bandwidth” your server uses for its connection to the Internet. If you’re running huge amounts of traffic to the server, plan on paying more.

The detriments of owning your own dedicated server are more numerous than with renting. You have to ship your server to the hosting company and make sure it is compatible with their racks. If you have a hardware problem, you have the issues of warranty servicing and gaining access to the server by a technician. The same problems occur with wanting to make upgrades. Also, you may have to pay some pretty hefty fees for operating systems, database software and licenses, and other software to be housed on your server. You don’t have access to the discounts that these big hosting companies have.

Here’s a few tips:

If you’re just to the point where you need a dedicated server, go ahead and rent. But rent from a good company with 24/7 telephone technical support. If you have problems, you need to talk to a human, and not one in some foreign country that isn’t 100% fluent in your language. You need to talk to someone that is in the same building as your server. My recommendation is the company where I host 3 of my servers: LiquidWeb. LiquidWeb can also colocate your owned server.

When shopping for dedicated servers to rent, try to find a pre-configured package that meets your needs rather than selecting a base model and customizing it by adding all sorts of things. Each time you add a feature, you add to the monthly price, and they can add up quickly. The pre-configured packages are usually a better value.

If you need more than just a basic, pre-configured package, contact a sales person. Most hosting companies have a “live chat” feature where you can talk to a representative. Ask them to quote you a specific price on a set of features, and tell them that you’re shopping around so give the best price they can.

When buying a server, consider buying used or refurbished IF the company you get it from includes a warranty. I found a great server on ebay today that was perfect for what I needed for $1,200, and it came with a 3 year warranty. A new one of the same configuration was $2,600.

When buying colocation, make sure you specify the speed of connection to the internet. A 10Mbit connection is fine for low-traffic situations, but if you run a service that demands big traffic at times, get at least 100Mbit.

If you have other questions about this process, feel free to comment and I’ll do my best to answer.

Comments Feed

1. Nate Rodgers says:

   Some extremely good points in this article. I would also note that if you do colo vs lease if you do have hardware issues you will incur the cost to purchase new hardware and the time it takes to ship to the colo is also needed to be reviewed. I currently lease a windows dedicated server with Server Intellect. Server Intellect is a managed company which does the upgrades, adds patches, and runs malware scans each month on my dedicated server. This is quite time saving when your running a site which has huge amount of traffic. It should also be noted that many people who first purchase a dedicated server or colo many not have the skills needed to run their own server and should look into a managed dedicated server vs an unmanaged one.

   March 11^th, 2009 at 12:11 pm

2. Nathan says:

   Excellent point Nate!

   Liquidweb gives the same level of service. In fact, it’s the reason that I moved other servers over to them. My other servers would periodically suffer attacks from hackers or have problems that needed to be ferreted out. The first server I got from LiquidWeb just seemed to never have any problems at all. It was due to the fact that they were constantly updating the software on the server to prevent such problems. Love ‘em for that.

   March 11^th, 2009 at 2:20 pm

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