What do you guys think is the future of the dedicated servers market? It seems like more and more people purchase VPS' instead of dedicated servers... In some cases this is just a small step leading to a dedicated server, but others just stick with the VPS. I never really understood the advantages of a VPS anyways... Mind to share some thoughts?
Cloud is far better than VPS and Dedi, You can start with a resource like a VPS and grow to a level more powerful than a dedicated server.
As we see google put more attention towards speedy pages, we'll see people move away from slower servers. Even if they only have a limited amount of traffic, to avoid a speed penalty most will pay the premium to get something faster. Cloud is pretty fast, for those that require super fast, we'll see more dedicated though.
There's no way dedicated server will be out in this market. Think of the big companies/sites, they're all using dedicated server. Not just 1 physical server, but multiple servers which are clustered. VPS will only fit for you if resources that you will be using won't be that much.
Dedicated isn't the same as colo. Large companies purchase colo space and build their own servers. This is different from a dedicated server and different from a cloud instance. Cloud won't let you build to a better instance than dedicated, I do a lot of work here. They aren't bad servers, but they are by no means better than a dedicated. Virtual servers over multiple CPU's still aren't the best solution, and IO is often the bottle neck here, sharing memory bandwidth and disk IO. Most dedicated servers are severely lacking in one area or another. They're designed in such a way that you never get a well rounded computer. You get lots of memory and cpu, but a poor disk system. Or a slower cpu, lots of ram and a decent disk backend. You never see the best of all worlds. Colo allows you to build specific machines for your needs.
I think dedicated, vps and colo have different targets. Unless colocated servers will become cheaper and easier, i think dedicated servers will have future for their targeted users, as well as VPS (a cheap alternative, not so bad) or colocated. But if google is really starting to value even the speed of a website... well, colocated would be the right solution i think.
From what I've seen many of the dedicated offerings aren't that much better than cloud style systems. I think we'll find more people in the cloud than on dedicated. Colo scales best when you've got multiple servers and it's worth while having redundancy and other backups. It's far more intensive in terms of management and planning though. Server build out, maintenance, capacity planning and power consumption can be difficult for just a small company.