How Do You Know When You Need A Dedicated Server And What Size?

From a customer perspective, it's time for dedicated hosting when the costs of shared hosting exceed the costs of a dedicated server. That is, switch when it is cost-effective to do so.

Likewise, if shared hosting is costing you sales because of slow response times, then it may also be time to switch.

If you have a bunch of websites, odds are that some are winners and some are duds, with some in-betweens. You can cast off the duds or set them aside on the backburner until you have the time to tweak them, but, either way, you possibly have sites with low traffic that are costing you more on shared hosting than what they might if you have them all on your dedicated server.

So, there are always a variety of factors that come into play.

From the hosting perspective, always have plenty of space. This is especially true on mail servers. You will either need lots of space to handle the people that may not check their eMail as often as others. Or, you can, of course, enforce space limitations on mailbox size. If you do quotas, you don't need as much space as without quotas, but more is always better just so you have the swap space.

For a server, my opinion is to go with the fastest one you can afford with as much space as you can afford. With hard drives, especially, the larger you go, the lower the cost per gigabyte of storage. Over time, where most of the expense is going to be is in the bandwidth charges.

For backup, I follow the advice of a webhost from long ago. You have the main drive and then you have a backup drive that is at least twice as large as the main drive. Then, that is segmented into two partitions, so you have backup A and backup B. That means, that at any one time, you have two backups. Where possible, have a third backup that will be stored off-site. You can do the A & B backups daily and the external backup weekly. That way, in the absolute worst case, you've only lost one week of data, but in most cases, you'll lose at most one day's worth of data.

For how much storage you need when switching from shared to dedicated hosting, just add up how much space you use under shared hosting, and be sure to get at least that much on your dedicated server. But, of course, you want more than that to make room for future expansion.

If you know how much content you add to your sites each month, that can give you an idea for how large a hard drive to get on a dedicated server. Figure how much space you are currently using, and anticipate how much space you will need a year from now, or two years from now, etc. I'd go as far ahead as you can afford just so you don't have to replace hard drives as frequently due to exceeding the available space.

For hosting client sites, you can get that by analyzing how much space current customers use to form a basis for an average of how many clients you can maintain on a single server. Then, make sure there is plenty of overhead. You can always move clients from one server to another if need be, in order to maximize usage of various servers and to keep everyone's sites running as fast and smoothly as possible.

"How much backup is overkill?"

Don't think there is such a thing.
I don't have a dedicated server yet but if I did one of the things I would want to know is how long to do a "bare metal" restore. In other words, if your server crashes - not just your site - how long to do a complete restore? If that server is making you serious $ then this could be a very unpleasant wait?

Thanks for that very clear and logical answer Dan.

That's definitely the sort of specialized topic best discussed in a hosting owner discussion forum where the experts hang out.

I have a request, please do your part to straighten out useless "unlimited space and bandwidth" pricing that competition has forced the hosts to resort to. The real capacity of the server and threshold for "you need to scale up" advisories are so opaque. it takes trial and error testing or 3rd party performance evaluators to determine whether host A or B provides better performance.

I better trust premium services that provide realistic bandwidth and space guarantees for an account.

It's impossible to answer that really, because how many accounts you can realistically have on a single server isn't dependant solely on your service package offerings, by way of disk space and the like.

Some websites may actually use very little in the way of disk space, but experience heavy traffic, and command many concurrent requests/connections. This can put a lot of strain on one server.

I used to be a web-host, and had one customer on one server whose website was relatively small in comparison to that of many other customers' sites. But as far as bandwidth went, his requirements and useage were absolutely astronomical, because his website experienced continuously heavy traffic, all day of every day. His small site put more strain on the server than just about every other customer on that server combined, and had it not been for the fact he was prepared to pay extra for a huge amount of data-transfer, I'd have been forced to terminate his contract on the basis that a "shared hosting" environment wasn't sufficient for his requirements.

A lot of web-hosts will not advertise actual server resource usage limits in their package descriptions/advertisements, but if you look in their contracts they will often specify a hard percentage limit of the amount of "server resources" any single account can consume at any one time, or else cover their backs by stating "acceptable useage, at our sole discretion" ... or somethnig like that.

You really need to be calculating your packages and resource-usage limits for each of your servers, based on a "worst case scenario" - not only based on your server's total disk capacity, but also according to the overall specifications of that server (number and clock-speed of processors, amount of RAM, the size of your servers "bandwidth pipe" / connection, etc).

It's not an easy thing to work out, especially if the hardware specifications and configuration of your server inventory lacks any sort of consistency.

Thanks for the tips this is helpful!

personally all my servers are set up with RAID 1 configuration with 2 x 2TB hard drives, with this configuration on the server the second hard drive is an exact mirror of the main drive. I also do daily, weekly backups to offsite storage just in case.

You will want to disable ssh access ( or make sure it is jailed tightly )

Make sure there is a firewall, virus scanner, exploit scanner ect...

I use ConfigServer products

CSF - ConfigServer Security & Firewall
CXS - ConfigServer eXploit Scanner (cxs)

I also use the mailscanner - MailScanner Front-End for cPanel

Bandwidth is the biggest cost in a hosting company, If you can budget for it, get a unmetered connection from your NOC