Dedicated vs. Shared servers

How much difference did you notice....

[jick]

Advice and opinions on the performance differences between shared vs. dedicated IIS servers would be appreciated. Let me explain our situation.

We currently run a moderately successful web-site, getting around 1700 visitors a day and 50,000hits (on a not overly graphical site), on a shared NT/IIS4 web server at Superb. We have started to use databases and ASP scripting more and more. Our host is particularly good, Superb Internet, and performance is reasonable for our $40 per month. However, sometimes forms do take too long to be submitted, access to the site is sluggish, visitors cannot download our software, or some bright spark has crashed IIS4's ASP engine for 15minutes!

With all these minor problems I'm wondering whether to upgrade to a dedicated Windows 2000 server (with Superb, or maybe another host -- any recommendations, need ASP and MS Access databases).

My gut feeling is that we don't need a dedicated server -- I don't think we will utilise an entry-level dedicated server fully, nor even to 10 or 20% of it's capacity. But, the improved reliability is a plus point, and also maybe web-pages will be delivered quicker (especially ASP scripted pages) and the site will generally feel more responsive? Cost is not too much of an issue (US$200-300), if we will see a worthwhile improvement in some respect or another.

I would just be interested to hear of experiences and any speculation/insight into the performance increase we might experience with such an upgrade. I would rather avoid the upheaval if it probably won't be worthwhile for a 5-8x increase in cost.

[hayluke]

I was webmaster for a smallish hosting company and we had around 300 sites running off the same NT/IIS server. This generally worked fine for us.

One word of advice would be to check with your hosts as to whether they have the correct IIS settings for your site. Within IIS there is a section where you can select the predicted amount of hits a site will get and then the server can respond accordingly (I think it may even allocate some sort of extra memory but I'm not sure on this one).

In my opinion only very large corporate sites need their own dedicated servers but if you are experiencing site performance levels it definitely worth speaking to your host about these so they can check their server logs and possibly consider migrating your site to another server..

[David]

The decision you are trying to make is a tough one. I have stuggled with it for the last several months. A properly tuned server can easily handle a lot of busy sites. At My current host I am having similar problems. Scripts hang connections can be awsome to terrible. I am sure that with good research you can find a shared server that would be able to handle your needs.
I finally decided to go with the dedicated server. I think that the peace of mind that I am the only one that can crash the server was a big part of my decision. As I am getting into it, the ability to tune the server for my specific needs is a big plus.
I am sure that I am going to have some bad moments where I will second guess this move but it feels good now. Going Live next week!

Good Luck