If you guys came to DatMoney (or most of my sites for that matter) sometime last night, you would have noticed that it was down for about an hour or two. It was down sometime around 11pm EST but don’t worry, my servers didn’t crash or anything but rather my hosting company was moving all shared and VPS servers to a new datacenter. And yes, I’m currently on a shared server.
The Bad Part of Shared Hosting
There are a few bad parts about having shared hosting but one of them is the fact that you have no control on whether your server is going to go down for some maintenance, or in my case, servers getting moved to a new datacenter. Of course, there’s really no way of anticipating this and in the long run, you lose money from it.
When I say “you lose money from it” I mean you’re not earning revenue because obviously your site is down. So, if you have PPC or CPM ads on your site then you’re not going to be earning anything in that short time your site is down.
That may not seem like a lot to some of you guys but say you’re making $100/day from each website and you own five websites with primarily CPM and PPC ads as the main earners, on average you’ll be losing $20.83 per hour.
Of course, it could be a little more or a little less.
A couple other bad parts of having shared hosting is the fact that, um, it’s “shared”. So, say a website on the same hosting server as you spikes in traffic from Digg or something, this could very well slow down all of your sites from loading.
In addition, say a bad website is on the same server, you guys will most likely have the same IP and if they do some illegal actions or something, then you could go down with them as well. Of course, if your hosting company does their job, they would prevent any of that from happening.
I’m sure there’s other reasons but let’s move on.
Upgrade to Dedicated Servers?
I’ve been thinking about this for quite sometime now but I don’t know too much about the whole hosting situation. But I did some research and dedicated servers are the way to go if you own a small business or you get a lot of traffic. And I mean, a lot of traffic and you can’t afford to have your websites run slow or possibly crash.
Plus, if you upgrade to a dedicated server, you won’t ever have to worry about servers moving to a different datacenter or some routine maintenance. And hence, you won’t be losing out on money.
But does anyone know all the differences between the various types of dedicated servers? If so, can someone please explain to me in simple terms. 
Cheap Or Not to Cheap… That Is The Question?
As most of you guys already know, basic hosting can be as cheap a few dollars, VPS (virtual private servers) can be around $40 to $100 and dedicated servers usually start from around $100 a month and can go as high as $1,000. Of course, the really expensive ones are probably for sites that get millions to their site daily.
As of right now, nothing is drastically affecting (or is it effecting?) me besides the small things but as my websites continue to grow, my traffic, bandwidth, etc also increases. The good part is the fact that my earnings increase as well. But the point in running a business is to save as much as you can and spend when its needed, not as a luxury.
So, should I hold off on upgrading for now?
Do you guys have similar situations? Can someone tell me the differences in dedicated servers? What do or have you guys done?
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go VPS for the moment so you’d get a feel of using dedicated. The good ones I’ve used are Slicehost and Linode. They’re affordable and can handle the load.
There’s a catch though, on Slicehost you’d need to setup everything yourself or hire someone to setup the slice for you.
archondigital´s last blog ..A Dozen Drafts But Still Nothing Posted
Before you decide to ink a deal on shared web hosting, be sure to consider all the pros and cons of shared web hosting services above. After all, selecting a right web hosting services may be one of the most critical business decisions for your online business.
Shared web hosting is more risky and opens up potential security issues as other web masters having an account on the same web server could hacked to your sensitive data.
I have not visited your blog yesterday as I was not here.
I can not read your password protected post, Please help me how I can read the post?
Legitimate work at home jobs´s last blog ..List of dofollow blog that I use to comment
Shared or dedicated makes almost no difference really to downtime. The only thing you’re paying for with dedicated is total control and more processing resources. If your hosting company decides to move a cluster or reconfigure, or gets a terminal power cut etc etc then your sites are still going down. Perhaps where it makes a tiny difference is that on shared you can end up sharing with a fool that keeps on crashing the server, but any good host will have somebody like that removed soon enough.
Seriously, I run of half a dozen hosts using everything from dedicated to the cheapest $5 a month shared and the downtime differences are negligable. Unless you’ve got the traffic to warrant it or need root access then it’s a waste of money
Paul B´s last blog ..The Big Link Directory List
@ Paul B :The dedicated server hosting plans give the user 100% control over their sites and servers, but with that comes 100% of the responsibility to keep the website running smooth and performing consistently. This type of web hosting, therefore, requires the user to have the technical and managerial knowledge to monitor the systems and rectify any problems at once. This type of hosting is best for professionals who need full control, which obviously includes large corporations and organizations as well as most commercial operations.
@Paul, yes you are right there is still a chance for having a power outage, and things like that with the Dedicated hosting, but… the main thing is you don’t have other webmasters who are hogging up the resources of the server, or putting viruses on the server that could affect your website. At one time… when I was on a shared hosting server, I had my whole website content lost due to a virus that was spread around. I am much happier using a dedicated server, as I have been using for the past year.
Till then,
Jean
I know a place where you can check what other websites are hosting on the same ip.
(http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/). I tested http://www.datmoney.com. It says “There are 602 domains hosted on this IP address.”
I’m well aware of the advantages of dedicated hosting, shit I even own rack space in a local telecoms company where I sell dedicated server space. BUT for a blogger with a couple of thousand visitors a day (or even 20,000 for that matter) it’s a total waste of money.
I don’t know where people are having problems with their shared hosting but I’m currently with 4 different companies, serving up dynamic database driven pages to over 250,000 unique visitors a day and problems are very few and far between. But don’t let facts ever stop somebody from wasting their money on something that they don’t actually need.
Paul B´s last blog ..The Big Link Directory List
Oh and by the way does anybody actually comment in their own name around here or should I start calling myself “Super Cheap Cock Hardening Pills and Diet Stuff”
Paul B´s last blog ..The Big Link Directory List
It is really will make no difference when it come to the server downtime. And just wondering if the cost incur of having an own server worthwhile for any blogger.
Online Money´s last blog ..Get indexed within 48 hours or less on Google
yea, there are lots of issues with high CPU utilization on shared hostings.
Optimization is one way out. Other one is to use proper plugins. The one I use is a combo: Fastest Wordpress
Taranfx´s last blog ..Apple Magic Mouse [Multitouch] Review
I thought about this before I started blogging. And good I did not do it, now I know there’s a bad thing about this. Even if it’s expensive, It’s better to pay a host for yourself than to have it cheaper but your not sure of whats going to happen next because you don’t control it.
Nice post, thanks.