Shared Hosting on Fast Server vs. Slow Dedicated Server?

[Dolemite]

I currently have a few sites on shared hosting, and its worked just fine so far apart from those issues where I wish I had more control. The server has dual 1GHz P3's with something like 3 gigs of ram and fast RAIDed hard drives. So far I really don't have the traffic to justify a dedicated server, but I'm hoping to at some point. I do a reasonable amount of scripting and database queries for each of my sites. From how my sites respond, its hard to believe there are something like 100 other sites hosted on the same server.

I now have the option to move to a dedicated server, which is a P3 700 with 256MB and a single 7200RPM hard drive. Monthly cost would be about twice what I'm paying now. The datacenter sounds somewhat inferior to where my current server is located. I don't think I'll have much time and interest to devote to tuning the server for the best performance.

So given all those factors, does it still make sense to move to dedicated hosting? I personally would prefer have the absolute control of root-level access, but I'm not sure I'd see much speed increase at my current traffic level. I actually doubt my sites could respond and load much faster. Any thoughts?

[musicales]

This is a tricky one. My general advice is, if it aint broke, don't fix it. I moved to a dedicated from a shared and yes, whilst it is nice to have more control, there are a lot more issues involved, particularly security - I found updating AV software or checking settings quite hard via remote access.

Also, if you run your own you will have to have the database on the same server which does reduce the effeciency I think, or rather instability. I have not had great problems with response times (except when the ISP throttled my bandwidth!) despite getting several millions of hits a month. But I did get a RAM increase from 512 to 768 as the 512 was just too often near the limit.

So in your case specifically, when you say you won't have much time to fine tune things, and things are fine at the moment, I recommend you stick to what is working until such time as you really need more control.

[Dolemite]

With my shared hosting, I'm pretty sure the MySQL databases are run off the webserver itself, but of course it has the benefit of the second CPU.

But anyway, your point is well taken. I sometimes wish something would break at my current host so I'd have a better reason to leave. ;) There's just nothing sexy about virtual hosting. I've run the netmechanic tests on this server with excellent results every time. I do wish I had full control...and it would be nice to have the ability to turn every dumb idea I have into a working website without having to justify the hosting costs.

[musicales]

it would be nice to have the ability to turn every dumb idea I have into a working website without having to justify the hosting costs.

You sound as bad as me! The shared server I used to be on allowed unlimited domain names so I didn't have to worry about that. But in that case, yes, that would be a big advantage (But don't forget to budget for all the extra money you'll be spending on the domain name for sillyidea.com )

nothing sexy about virtual hosting

I do take that point as well - there's definitely a feelgood factor about running your own show. I played around with a lot more CGI and components etc once I had my own

The difficulty with dedicated servers is when you get into reasonable bandwidth it gets quite pricey. I tried to find a host that isn't 'one of the big boys' but is still reliable enough - the big boys are just way too expensive (though I am on Windows which is a bit more pricey anyway)- but I've had my far share of problems, I can tell you!