Choose Dedicated Hosting

This guide will attempt to be the definitive guide on choosing a dedicated hosting plan.
If you feel I have missed something, please feel free to post a reply at the bottom.


The time has come to upgrade to a dedicated server, or perhaps you’re looking to switch from one provider to the next. Finding an affordable dedicated Internet server to host your websites can be rather complicated and take up more time than it needs to. This post is here to act as a complete guide to help point you into the right direction and help you determine what you need from your dedicated website hosting.
SECTION A:
Getting Started With Determining Dedicated Server Needs, Pricing and Suppliers
For starters, there are 3 primary components that must be taken into consideration for your dedicated server hosting solution.

1. Business Requirements
2. Dedicated Web Server Configuration Requirements
3. Dedicated Hosting Budget

Business Requirements
This can mean a multitude of things. For example, do you know how many website visitors you will be expecting over any given length of time? Will the sites hosted on the dedicated server host be mission-critical for your business? There’s literally dozens of things to consider, but you know your business best. To get you started, here’s a list of a few things you’ll want to look into and consider when finding your dedicated Internet server provider.

• Backup Solutions and Disaster Recovery
• Security, firewalls, anti-spam and anti-virus and all around server protection
• eCommerce considerations such as SSL certificates and secure access to the dedicated server through, for example, a VPN
• Uptime Requirements
• Does your business require certain official standards to be met by service partners
• Server management services
• Geographical requirements and/or local laws

That is far from being a completed list, so take some time and determine what your business requirements are. The more you know of before you start looking for your dedicated server, the more informed your final decision will be.

Dedicated Web Server Configuration Requirements
Similar to your business requirements, there’s a huge number of things to consider when determining a configuration for your dedicated server host. Fortunately, it is a finite number of things so we can address a large number of them in this hosting blog. To try and keep this as simple as possible for you, here are the 8 things I would look at when trying to figure out what configuration to go with on my dedicated web server.

• Server Management
• Operating System
• The Web Server
• Database Application
• Speed and Performance
• Bandwidth & Data Transfer
• Data Center
• Scalability & Future-Proofing

1. Server Management: First things first. Are you, or is someone within your organization, capable of handling the required tasks of doing server system administration?
Most dedicated server hosting providers will provide you with what’s known as ‘root’ access. This means you can SSH into the server and perform maintenance at the command line. People that are comfortable with performing these tasks would probably be best off with an unmanaged dedicated server. If you’re not sure what root access is or means then you need to go with what’s called Managed Hosting or a Managed Dedicated Internet Server. NOTE: Not all managed hosting servers are the same! Read that again because it’s important and needs to be understood. Many hosting providers that offer managed hosting simply mean that they’ll monitor the server for you. If you don’t want to do any system administration on your server you need a fully managed dedicated server. To get a better idea of what that means, visit SevenL’s managed hosting section ‘here‘. There are 3 services listed. A fully managed server would encompass all of those service offerings.