Category Archives: Dedicated Server

So, your business has outgrown its shared hosting account. The resources provided by that plan simply aren’t enough to meet your needs any longer; you need something bigger. Something better.

You need a dedicated server.

Simple awareness isn’t enough here. You can’t just march up to a host and tell them you need a dedicated server without understanding the resource requirements. That’s a surefire recipe for disaster—either you’ll select a server that isn’t powerful enough, and everything slows to a crawl, or you’ll run with one that’s too powerful, and break your budget. Read more »

Believe it or not, developing and running a massively multiplayer online game is one of the more complex tasks in the world of networking. Not only do you need to manage everything you’d ordinarily deal with while running a server, you’ve a whole plethora of additional tasks to tackle. These include (among others) cheat prevention, game balance, latency, game maintenance, and state management.

For this reason, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that there’s actually a great deal one can learn by studying some of the more successful developers in the world of online gaming. How they run their servers – along with the mistakes they’ve made, both past and present – can serve as a great primer for any budding administrator, regardless of whether or not  they’ve an interest in gaming. Read more »

Dedicated servers aren’t for everyone. The’re more expensive than other hosting options, and — depending on your host — require a more technical know-how than a shared hosting solution. That said, for the right business, a dedicated server is the perfect choice.

How can you tell if your business is the “right” business? Read more »

Businesses have a multitude of different options to choose from when it comes to making a decision about the sort of hosting platform to build their web presence on. Today’s hosting market is crowded with products, including shared hosting, virtual private servers, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers. Each fills a niche and meets particular set of needs. In this article, I’m going to focus on dedicated servers, the circumstances in which hosting on a dedicated server is appropriate, and the advantages of using a dedicated server compared to other hosting packages.

What Is A Dedicated Server

A dedicated server is a physical machine whose resources are entirely at the disposal of one client. Most hosting packages involve some degree of resource sharing. Obviously that’s true of shared hosting, where dozens or more clients have sites on one server. But it also applies to virtual private servers, where one physical machine is divided into many virtual machines using virtualization technology, and hybrid servers, which are essentially more powerful virtual private servers, with the physical machine divided into fewer virtual machines.

A dedicated server is an undivided, unshared server that occupies one physical machine in a data center. All of its processing power, RAM, storage, and bandwidth allocation is used by the business that “rents” it. Dedicated servers differ from collocated servers only in that the hardware is usually owned by the hosting company or the data center, rather than the business. Read more »