Forum Moderators: phranque
While I was searching for Dedicated Servers, I learnt about Virtual Dedicated Servers but I am not very sure about their reliability? Are Virtual Dedicated Servers useful? My website current serves over 2500-3000 visitors a day resulting in 30,000 pageviews and I am expecting the traffic to grow by atleast 2 folds in the next few months as I start some PPC campaigns and Email Marketing for my website. Can a Virtual Dedicated Server cater such needs assuming my website to be more of less dynamic website written in php?
You can find dedicated servers in the "entry-level" around 100/120$.
Just moving to a dedicated server you will have a 10/20% increase in traffic. Don't waste your time in virtualized servers and do the right step.
Good luck.
thanks for your reply.
Just moving to a dedicated server you will have a 10/20% increase in traffic.
How?
Can a Virtual Dedicated Server cater such needs
Depends on the underlying hardware, how many other virtual servers it's running, and how much traffic they are getting.
Just like shared hosting you are still sharing the hardware, but you have your own sand boxed file system, OS and applications.
Just moving to a dedicated server you will have a 10/20% increase in traffic.
How?
Hosters usually do "overbooking". Once you quit to share the hardware your pages will load quicker and you do not lost some visitors (if your page needs more than 5 sec. to load, I'll move to another site).
Maybe you don't realize you were losing vistors because them never entered your site.
Anyway, this (like love or panic) is something you can't explain or believe until it happens to you.
if your page needs more than 5 sec. to load, I'll move to another site
In my experience it's more like 3 seconds.
30,000 pageviews
That's not huge (unless those pages are large files and/or graphics heavy) and a decent virtual server would probably handle that OK, but if those page views are generating money for you (or some other value) then owning your own server will make the experience quicker for your users and give you some headroom.
You then need to consider whether or not you need managed or self-maintained.
You can find dedicated servers in the "entry-level" around 100/120$.
You can indeed, but bear in mind those will not be maintained servers, which means you're responsible for fixing it when it gets hacked and goes offline.
Good managed hosting of dedicated servers starts at around $300, last time I looked.
I am making mind for a dedicated server. Based on your experiences, do you think a Celeron processor 2.0 Ghz and 1 GB RAM will be good enough to start with (keeping in view 50-60K pageviews a day)
I would recommend giving a go to VPS - Virtual Private Server. It will look like dedicated and those VPS get more resources allocated to them - if you need more RAM you can upgrade it - it is a great improvement from ordinary virtual hosting yet without expense of dedicated server.
Agreed. Your traffic isn't that much, and a VPS might do the job fine for now. Not mentioned in the thread, but they usually also have a dedicated IP#, which is a big plus compared to what you have.
You could probably do close to 50K pageviews in an hour with that machine if it's properly tuned to your database.
[edited by: phranque at 7:21 am (utc) on Sep. 10, 2008]
[edit reason] cleanup [/edit]
