Will a dedicated server help?

Shared server downtime intollerable...

[netscan]

My 3 sites currently reside on a shared server setup and lately the server has been going down for increaseingly longer periods.

My question is, Is a dedicated server more reliable than a shared server? I don't really need the power of a dedicated server but will make the leap if it means my site can be up close to the 99.9% that they advertise. The hosting company is quite large so it's not a matter of inexperiance, I think it's more a matter of over selling. It would only be a price difference of about $30, but 30 bux is 30 bux....

[BwanaZulia]

In my experience it did.

Many moons ago, I lived in a shared server but got tired of slow response time and bad customer service. I went to my own "housed" dedicated servers (in a closet in a friends house) but the hardware become the problems.

Since then I have been at RackSpace and now only worry about my own software (web application, etc).

I don't mind paying for quality and good customer service, so I do.

BZ

[Leonidas]

I quite agree - I get much better customer service from my ISP since I moved to a dedicated server, and I have complete confidence that my sites are running as fast as they possibly can.

But it ain't cheap...

[netscan]

Well you guys have sold me. I have ordered one, two week wait..., like I said before it's only a $30 difference, but when the pages aren't getting served it's a moot point I guess...

My site was down for 10 hours, they blamed the raid controller, 10 hours for a raid controller?

Since my site is visited by the bots throughout the day, will there be a hit in the way of the search engines since it was down so long? Heck, I had a total of 5 visitors today... That just hurts...

[lammert]

Only 30$ more for a dedicated server makes me a bit suspicious. The only way they can do this IMHO is by virtual dedicated hosting, where you can configure your own environment but are still with more users on one machine. How many diskspace do they offer? If it is more than 40GB it is probably dedicated hosting, but with less space I would bet it is virtual dedicated.

Are you staying with the same hosting company? The hardware for a dedicated server might be the same as for the virtual servers. You will certainly have a better response time, but for only 30$ more I doubt if the hardware will be any better, afterall they told you the down time was because of hardware failures.

[netscan]

This is the server specs:

Intel Celeron
2.0 GHz or higher
256 MB DDR RAM
40 GB IDE hard drive
500 GB monthly transfer volume

Worth $50? (If they can keep it running ;) )

Like I said earlier, they are a large hosting company, I don't want to violate the TOS so I won't go into too much detail, but I can tell you (I think) that I got my first 3 years of shared hosting free...
so I think they are trying to be the Wal-Mart of hosting companies. Besides the recent downtime, I have been pleased with their service.

The price I'm paying now makes it difficult to just up and switch hosts, which is why I asked about dedicated servers. Should I cancel the order and dump them?