I currently use shared hosting for my database driven sites and am considering upgrading to dedicated server. I am looking for some information on whether a cheap server (1.8 GHz, 512MB) would likely be a better performer than the “business packages†you can buy for around £200. I realise that there are a number of factors which can affect performance; however I would appreciate some general guidance from anyone who has upgraded.
Cannot say exactly, cause it really depends on your site. And you mentioned to cheap server, it seems an old-hardware server? What kind of shared hosting you are using? On a stand-alone server or clustered system?
At the moment I have the a "Business" shared package with Fasthosts. Details are at http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/hosting/linux-business/full-details/. They do offer a dedicated server for £49 (http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicatedservers/). I do not have any information as the type of hosting they use.
You might want to contact them to ask more about their *load balancing* feature. Remember when going to vps, dedicated server, all your stuff run on one server. In *load balancing* or *clustered* environment, your websites' requests can be processed by several servers, connected together by gigabit connections. We have some customers moving from VPS from other vendors to our clustered shared hosting, and they feel better performance
For the last 6 months ive been on a dedicated server, an entry level p4, 2 ghz, its been fine running my 30 or so sites, most of them are database driven. I had real bad luck with VPS, i found that the shared hosting was better than trying to cram all my sites on a VPS. I soon moved on from VPS to dedicated, i was lucky enough to get a self managed server for $75 a month, but i recently messed something up and I'm now being charged $75 a hour for them to fix it. Managed would of been a better option, but i have been renting it for 6 months + and have saved a $100 per month by being self managed, so if the bill comes in cheap enough, maybe self managed is a better option. Definitely research your options before buying.
Remember P4 2GHz comes with old hardware. You should backup your data frequently. A high-end VPS is even better than it, I believe. Raid-10 disks, quad-core CPU etc. Powerful if you have enough RAM, and your vendor doesn't oversell
depending on what you are running, a small P4 2.4 or 3.0GHz should work find for you. You can get server management from $30/month to help ensure you are not going to have any downtime. How many sites will you be running? how many hits per site you get a day? Let me know if we can help you with your move. With the value of the dollar right now our services would be pretty cheap for you!
Moving from Shared to Dedicated is a big step. You need to make sure you know what you are doing. With shared hosting, your host is responsible for managing the server, environment, security etc. With a dedicated box you would be responsible for all of this, unless of course you take the managed route which can be expensive. Most hosts can offer you custom scalable solutions (such as ourselves) or even provide you semi-dedicated accounts which are managed. Options like this can save you a lot of time and more importantly, money. This means you are able to focus on meeting your goals rather than worrying about your site uptime.
If you decide to buy a dedicated server, try to buy from US suppliers. because the dedicated servers in us are cheaper than the european ones. you can compare the price in their sites. for example a based server just like Pentium 4 (2.8GHz) - 1G DDR2 RAM - 80 gb - port 100 MB - 1500 GB Transfer in US is near 70$ / m windows Standard Edition is 35$ / m I posted this, because I saw that your prices are in pound, and I think you`d better to move your hosting to US.