I finally made a decision (plus, I’m sort of getting forced to) and I’m going to upgrade to a dedicated server for hosting. I’ve been considering this for quite sometime and even wrote a post about it back in October but since a couple of my sites traffic have been exploding on a regular basis, I’m in serious need of my own personal resources.
I was actually contacted by my hosting company letting me know that I’m using a lot of resources because of the traffic that I’m getting for a couple of my sites. The main issue I’ve been having is the fact that its slowing down my loading time and since I’m currently on a shared hosting server, its going to slow down everyone elses’ site on the server as well.
So, I’m not trying to be selfish here, plus, I just look at this as taking my online entrepreneurship a step further in the right direction. I know I’ve been slacking a little bit but whenever I get a little kick in the ass, it’s usually for the good. Plus, we all need a kick in the behind sometimes just to get that needed momentum once again.
If you guys are wondering how much traffic my sites are getting, I’ll just say its in six figures on a monthly basis. And since I’m getting so much traffic and people are visiting my sites, its slowing down my loading time.
I’m not exactly sure which dedicated server plan I’m going to choose just yet but more than likely I’ll be choosing just a basic one with the intent of upgrading, if needed.
I’m sure a lot of you guys have more experience with dedicated servers than I do, what are your thoughts on this? Is there anything you guys can recommend for me to add/check out before I upgrade?
And just a heads up if you’re reading this, if my site is down, more than likely it’s due to the fact that my site is being transferred over to the new server.
I think that every succesful blogger that owns more than 3 good Sites comes to this dilemma. In my case was the opposite. I was one of those guys that thought that everything was going to be amazing when I first start creating sites and grabed from the very begining a dedicated server. I spent more than two hundred bucks a month for two years without any revenue.
Then I decided to get a reseller account, those you get for $25 at hostgator, which has worked great by the way. Everything changed since I did that, the traffic started to climb and the money too. Now I have 20 domains on a silver $50 reseller account (twice bandwidth), with 4 of those sites receiving more than 15,000 visitors a day. And still with that the reseller account is more than enough.
The thing with a dedicated account is that if you want to get a good cpu you have to pay a lot. Besides, you only need dedicated servers if you are thinking of sending thousands of mails via bulletin or if for some reason you really need to access the shell.
Traffic or bandwidth should never be considered as reasons to get a dedicated server because there are other ways to optimize the memory and server load. Some of them are passing all the data base information to xml data bases. Other good thing is to host your images on imageshack or photobucket.
Anyway, I’m glad that things are going well with your blogs Jay and you’ll know what’s best. That’s inspiring for all of your followers, including me.
I have a dedicated server with Lunarpages.
I pay $170/m and get a server that has never had a problem with handling traffic.
Gripes:
-Can’t buy shared IPs; only dedicated.
-Linux kernel updates cost you money if you want them to do it.
-My mail server needed modifications to allow me to even email other people. Charge: $35
Overall I like them, though. 3-5 problems with them over the span of three years isn’t bad.
(Once they banned my IP address from accessing my server on accident. That was a moment I almost got a new host
)
Mid Mo Mortgage´s last blog ..Feb 4 – Senate to Vote on Job-Creation Legislation Next Week
JAy, if you are staying at hostgator (I think that is where you said you where hosting) You may want to check out their VPS plans. You can actually get more power with one of their VPS solutions than you can with a basic dedicated.
When I first went dedicated this option was not available. I outgrew my dedicated so I moved to one of their VPS’s which gives me more power. The only negative is that I don’t have as much diskspace, but I did not need all the diskspace anyway and I doubt you do either. Might want to consider one of these VPS’s instead of a dedicated. I’ve found that mine performs a lot better than my dedicated ever did.
One tip if you do go this route. Get them to recompile apache as a dso and install xcache. It will be a good 35 bucks to pay.
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Who were you hosting with when you got the resource warning? I’ve got several sites that average 30-40k visitors a day and have never had an issue with shared hosting resources.
I wish I had that same ‘problem’ as you with the six figure/month traffic!
Great move indeed. You got pretty good visitors each day and it’s good for you to have dedicated servers so you will no need to worry about the bandwidth in the future.
Lee | Money4Invest´s last blog ..February Calendar 2010 | Calender 1600×1200 Wallpaper
The first choice is easier because you can get a server located anywhere in the world so you can shop around for the best service and price. A hosting provider can help you install cPanel, register domain and configure your server.
I don’t think a dedicated server is useful till you’ve got a website with a script that takes up a lot of sources.
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woah, now I want to change to a dedicated server! but can’t afford too bad