Dedicated Server - Pros, Cons and Recommendations?

[mjp3000]

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re: VPS - had lots of problems with virtual private servers (probably just me) - They seem like a perfect cost effective solution, however it is just glorified shared hosting... so if someone elses VPS brings down the server, it could possibly have an affect on yours.

Umm... not, that's not really accurate. **Putting my vmware engineer hat on**

In a virtual environment you have guests (i.e. your virtual server) and hosts (the physical server running them all).

If someone trashes a guest, it will have no impact on your virtual server. Their virtual server will die, reboot, come back online exactly as a 'real' server in total isolation to yours. Yours will just carry on running.

It's not possible for a guest to trash a host, unless the host had been set up by a moron.

If the host goes down, yes, all the virtual machines on it will go down with it. But there are plenty of technologies which provide failover and live migration to another host, like VMware HA, DRS, vMotion etc (for vmware ESX - other virtualisation products have their own equivalents).

At best, your virtual machine will transfer to another host and carry on running with no downtime. At worst, it will have a virtual reboot while transferring to another host.

Good and well set up virtual hosting should not be looked at as glorified shared hosting. It gives you everything a dedicated physical server does and much more. To get equivalent disaster recovery and fault tolerance in the physical world, you'd need at least a 2 server cluster, which would cost... a lot.

Physical dedicated servers have their place, and I've got one with heart which suits my needs fine. But virtualisation has moved on so much over the last few years that in most cases now, virtual servers would almost certainly be the way to go.

[thelittledude]

I use Rackspace - around £400 a month for each Dell Dual XEON RAID1 15K SCSI setup with managed backup and service. Runs RHEL5 (although I tend to use BSD almost exclusively RackSpace don't support it). They don't support remote KVM (their only downside) but engineers 24/7 will help you out (for a fee unless its minor...).

Currently run 10 of these servers so I am paying £4K/month (roughly) for servers.

However you can get a dedicated Celeron for 30 quid a month and a Good SMP machine for under 100. But you really need to consider bandwidth availability and network reliability as well as power reliability etc etc Also on a failure will they help.. some providers may take up to 48hrs to sort an issue out and that means loss of profit (and potentially google issues!).. I could go on... Been there... its a not very pleasant experience.

Previously I hosted my own Dell 1U Servers in a Data Centre (locally) but found it a pain in the arse as they were charging me 50-100 quid a callout just to get an hour physically with the machines (I daren't reboot remotely because a boot failure would cost me 50 quid!!). Also the machines were not cheap and are now lying idle in my basement!!!

Having your own server means you can utilize a consistent metric base for scalability and performance. I run various tools and can immediately determine bottlenecks and plan accordingly. I like that.

If you do go the Virtual Server route you need to trust them when they say they guarantee a performance minimum. For example they might host more VM's than they admit on a machine (to make more profit). Trust noone here.

If you are making say about £1K a month - the decision really is made for you. I know no serious infrastructure that depends on virtualization for critical functions. To me my profit is critical


I would like to add to this... research carefully your provider... back in '06 in a moment of madness (to quote Ron Davies!) I purchased a dedicated server deal off ebay which turned out to be a one man cowboy operation! The service was a nightmare... and the guy blamed it on everything from flooding to poor routing but NEVER to himself!