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What should you buy? Cheap Servers, Power Servers, or High Performance Servers

Dedicated hosting services, or better known as web hosting companies, tend to offer three kinds of dedicated server packages that are broken down as follows: budget: Cheap servers, power servers and High Performance Servers and lastly enterprise servers. And while the names may make you think that the cheap web servers are inferior to the other two groups, they are all excellent server packages. It just depends on what you need them for.

Take for example bandwidth transfers, high end servers can serve out more web pages and data than budget servers, but if you need a dedicated server to handle serving large files that do not require much CPU processing you might just save some money and buy a cheap dedicated server.

IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HIGH END SERVERS AND CHEAP DEDICATED SERVERS

There are many important differences between a cheap server and a high end server and they are not all bandwidth based, as I am sure some of you have seen a high end server hosting package that offers the exact same monthly bandwidth transfer as a cheap or value dedicated server and wondered what is the extra expense really doing for me.

Well to summarize some of the big differences between budget dedicated servers and high end dedicated servers can be broken down into hardware redundancy, processing capability, data transfer speeds, and ability to handle concurrent connections.

Redundant Servers


A redundant server is ideal for mission critical data or web sites that need the highest amount of uptime. By providing failover protection in the main areas of hardware failure such as hard drives, power supplies, voltage regulator modules for the CPUs and of course the CPUs themselves, the Ethernet ports (used to be either net cards) and lastly the RAM. Oh and from a cooling standpoint the ever important cooling fans.

Over time the chance of you needing the advantages of redundant server increases. Speaking from past experience I have had hard drives fail, CPUS die due to cooling fans that stopped working and NIC cards die but since the web servers I had were redundant servers (something that more than a few people thought was overkill) I have had a power supply die as well but that was in a office system not a web server.

Hard drives are your most vulnerable piece of equipment in your server, since they have moving parts and moving parts do wear out over time. The easiest way to protect your server and your data from a hard drive failure is by mirroring the drive(s) so effectively one drive has the exact same information as the other and if one fails the other is still up and running. You can accomplish this in two ways using hardware RAID or a software RAID solution. Read more --->

Hot Swap Power Supplies for Redundant Servers

Hot swap power supplies are the best solution for ensuring that your redundant server stays powered on. Most redundant server chassis allow for two to three hot swap power supplies so they have failover protection. A hot swap power supply allows you to remove it while the dedicated server is still running, allowing you to replace a bad one without having to shutdown the web server. While most redundant servers can run on just one power supply it is highly recommend to have at least one additional one as backup.

Green Servers and Energy Efficient Server Power Supplies

While there is a strong movement towards Green Servers and green web hosting most current Server hardware requirements demand high current draws and therefore the power supplies will be more expensive. Keep in mind that as the motherboards change so do the connectors.
Read more --->

 

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