A Change in Paradigm: Dedicated Server

I found it hard to believe, but suddenly I was faced with a real problem. Well, I suppose most people would not consider it a huge problem, quite the opposite, in fact. However, it was stressing me out complete, interfering with my writing. I even had trouble sleeping.

What was this horrendous problem? My web site was becoming very popular. So popular, in fact, that I was getting very worried about bandwidth charges.

You see, this was happening after September 11th, 2001, and I had been reading about some people who had created very special and beautiful sites. These sites were so incredible that they attracted lots and lots of visitors. So many visitors that they received hundreds of gigabytes worth of traffic. The webmasters suddenly found themselves charged hundreds or even thousands of dollars for using bandwidth over their allocations.

I had purchased a contract with a shared hosting service which allowed 27gb/month of traffic. This seemed like more than enough at the time. However, I was noticing the bandwidth increasing at an alarming rate - about 2gb/day. At that rate, I would exceed the allotment by quite a bit. I had some time, but not much.

Okay, what to do? I looked around at the various shared hosting options and didn't see much that was all that attractive. There were some that offered "unlimited" bandwidth - I didn't trust these at all. Most of the terms and conditions actually did place a "reasonable" limit of some kind. I preferred a limit that was know verses a limit that was unknown.

Actually, truth be known, I was getting a little tired of the paid host option. I mean, it's far improved from free hosts, but there is still much room for improvement. Some of the things that were bothering me were:

Downtime - All of the shared hosting servers that I'd checked out so far seemed to be down more often than desired. I've been in the computer industry for over 23 years, and to me a few hours of downtime in an entire year is about all that's acceptable. It's not that hard to achieve these kinds of statistics - I've been doing it myself for years.

Support - The level of support from virtually all hosting companies I've used to date has been pathetic to mediocre. My expectation is simple. My site is down, I want someone to work on it quickly. I want to call someone, get an answer right away, and get the problem resolved. Especially during normal business hours. I have never received that level of support from any hosting company yet.

Strange errors - I've noticed that my web sites will run fine for a few days or weeks, then start having strange delays. I know this because I monitor my sites with an automated service. These delays are probably caused by things that other customers are doing on the same server.

Lack of communication - Web host support people seem to forget that we webmasters and businessmen depend upon our web sites. I don't know about you, but if my site goes down for any length of time I completely freak out. I want to know why it's down and what's being done about it. And virtually always I get no answers. This is most annoying when the downtime has been planned - these hosts have my email address, why is it so hard to send an email and let me know what's going on?

Log file issues - Log files are very important to any true webmaster. They are useful for finding errors, gauging traffic and determining the success of promotions and articles. Yet so far all of the shared hosts gave me incredible grief about log files. They seemed to want to initialize them at odd intervals (unpredictable), didn't allow easy access, allowed too easy (unsecured) access and generally made it difficult.

Okay, given all of that, it was time to make a change. Not just a change to another host, but a change in paradigm.

I had tried free hosts (three of them) before deciding they were not at all suitable for anything except a small hobby web site. I moved up to paid shared hosts and for a while was happy. I moved, then moved again, then again. The hosts were all fine for a while, then starting having trouble.

Shared hosting was not doing what I needed. The straw that broke the camels back was a question of bandwidth. Internet Tips and Secrets was exceeding 50gb a month (almost four million hits and three quarters of a million page views). Wow.

I could not find a shared host that offered a package of a full gigabyte of disk and upwards of 50gb a month. Not a single one after looking at over a hundred different packages.

I had a real problem. You see, go over the monthly bandwidth charge and you get smacked with huge overcharges. For the web host I had at the time, the charges were $6 per gigabyte. This would make my hosting bill very large indeed.

Thus I began looking for a dedicated hosting service. I quickly found a company and purchased a single month.

Here's what I got. A web server all to myself. I could define as many as 250 different web sites on the server, and I had complete control of the DNS. I had root access to the server (meaning I was more or less god on the box) and could literally do anything I wanted. I could install anything, do anything and control or not control everything.

I had 9gb of disk space. Best of all, the service provided a whooping 400gb of bandwidth usage per month. The server was extremely fast for my needs. All for around $200/month plus a setup fee.

The downside (there is always a downside, isn't there)? The price was a little steep, but a predictable $200 a month is far superior to a surprise $500 or even $100 hosting charge. They also didn't provide any real autoresponders (but I solved that by purchasing a package) or web based email. Their support is also very basic - they have a 24 hour help desk which is friendly and competent, but they do not appear to be technical heavyweights.

Thus I have now, after a week of hard work, begun a new adventure - a dedicated web server for the 16 sites that my wife and I own. So far, the experience is far superior to the shared hosting nightmares that I've been facing.

Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.