Don't get swayed by the heading. It's all about what I believe, that doesn't mean I am against the Google's cloud concept coined in 2006. Every business is different in terms of strength, capacity and capital, so does there resource requirements are. In an application driven environment where functionality and performance directly impact your business and brand, you can't afford to see clients switching to your rivals due to bad experiences at yours.
Both dedicated and cloud hosting models are claimed to be the best for budding businesses in terms of resources and computing capabilities. They come with their pros and cons. When you plan to host your mission-critical applications, both could be the best options. But when you are new to the business and don't need as much resources, dedicated hosting is the better option.
If you're still not convinced, here are points to prove the dedicated server's worth:
Dedicated Servers Perform Better, Perhaps:
I personally believe that dedicated servers deliver better performance than cloud. Cloud servers can't compete the level of performance that a properly configured dedicated server can deliver. The bigger let down with cloud servers is that the network and underlying storage are shared among customers. That causes dis I/O errors at times. In case another customer begins to send large amounts requests to the storage array, slowdowns occur. It's noteworthy that most of the cloud vendors offer more storage, not faster storage.
The crux is that if your business is simple and doesn't need complex resources, a single dedicated server hosting could offer you better result than expensive cloud servers.
Transparency Issues:
Transparency becomes a core issue when it comes to sneak inside the application and explore complicated performance and reliability issues and fixed them out. With most of the Cloud vendors, you're not allowed to look into what are the bottlenecks that affecting your server performance. With cloud hosting, two major issues occur time and again- workloads due to shared resources and underlying hardware errors. Comparatively, dedicated hosting is less prone to such glitches.
Redundancy Issues:
Most of the cloud vendors sell off their cloud services with a tag of being inherently redundant. But this is often not the case. Nodes used in cloud computing are less reliable than dedicated servers. When it's cloud computing, it's the compute node that functions in all means. If the node dies, workload dies. This is quite a complex thing and requires enough time and efforts to setup, monitor and maintain.
Cost Factors:
Cloud is always an expensive deal. If you are a small web design or web development firm, cloud hosting could be a burden to your budget. When you observe deeply the requirements you needed to run your online business, you'll find that even dedicated servers from a reliable web hosting company could fulfill your resource needs and offer best value. Adding up storage units and hard drives further soars up the cost of cloud or VPS systems.
Dedicated servers are much safer and offer better performance because the connections are direct. They also offer full control of your data management. When you run of out of storage space, you simply need to get an additional server to handle the new load.
Choosing dedicated servers offer client more power and freedom if compared to other web hosting plans available to their disposal. You must have reached to a threshold where you want to replace existing shared hosting with dedicated hosting plans. Buying a dedicated server is quite a daunting task, thus should be planned well. These servers cost huge, so hasty decisions may blow your hosting budget.
How To Get The Most Out Of Your Dedicated Servers?
Most of the clients however fail to maintain the health of their dedicated servers and therefore lose considerable amount of resource and budget. I am listing here a few mistakes that I have noticed clients doing unintentionally with their dedicated hosting servers:
Failing To Manage Cost:
This is the biggest loophole, I constantly talk about. This is an area where most of the clients tend to make a mistake. Though, dedicated servers are already expensive and seldom have hidden cost, many organizations underestimate the maintenance cost in case the servers are left unmanaged. Before switching to the dedicated server, make sure that you're aware of the ever single penny you're going to invest on the server.
Problems With Permissions and Logins:
I have seen many clients who skip creating tough passwords and enabling stringent user permissions when they buy a dedicated server. This should be the first recommendation I' ll suggest. Three things that should be implemented first are :
- Setting a secure and an unbreakable password
- Disabling root logins
- Limiting the file permissions
- Passwords that are easy to guess may give hackers a passage for attacking your server space.
Ignoring Security Threats:
Servers are vulnerable to threats, so you should always take measures to keep them secure. Ask your top web hosting company to provide you server shield, server hardening and 24X7 server monitoring. If you've purchased dedicated server or paid for the data center services, it doesn't mean security isn't your responsibility.
Ignoring the Business Requirements:
Even though you've scrutinized your requirements before flagging off the purchase, it's recommend to see through it once more. Your business might need several resource that you need to fill in. Just before rolling out the deal, make a checklist. Check if you have mentioned following pointers in the list or if your provider have missed any one or more in the service bundle you subscribed for.
- Disaster recovery
- Secure access to dedicated servers and integrity of data
- Management of heavy/ large-sized files
- PCI Compliancy
- Firewalls, protection against Distributed DOS attacks
- High availability
- Scalability
Not Giving Time To Understand Technology:
After purchasing the dedicated servers, spend some time on learning its functionaries rather jumping upon immediately. Before start working with it, make sure you know how to properly using the technologies involved. Learn the best practices involved in monitoring and security of the servers. Putting up things in operations without knowing the basics might create disasters.
Missing The Network Factor :
Your server might be of great power, but network is also an important entity. This is why, while selecting a host, you needn't to focus entirely on specs but also at network and power redundancy and reliability of the resources.