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Help - I'm Outgrowing My Server!

The story

Joanne runs a small organization with a web presence but is not a “web company.” Joanne uses the web to enhance her offerings to her clients. She and her small staff use broadcast e-mail, a customer login area for support, and has an extensive collection of online content. In addition, she uses her website to support her office, with online tools for customer management.

What Joanne has found is her $99.99 a month hosting contract for a partial server isn’t cutting it. She’s running out of space. She’s constantly using her “computer guy” to band-aid the server with restarts. There’s more software she wants to incorporate, but can’t because there isn’t room. Even growing the number of clients is straining her resources. What are her options at this point? What can she do?

Hosting options

Cheap hosting

When you buy a hosting contract you have several options. At the low end of the scale is space on a shared server. The price can range from $9.99 a month to about $150. This is your basic hosting package for a database and an application, using a technology like PHP or ASP.NET. They’re designed for static content, one or maybe two applications, a database and e-mail accounts. This is the best way to get started but you can outgrow this option quickly.

Virtual server

The next tier up is the “fractional server.” Using virtualization, a vendor is able to take a single server and divide the server resources between some number of clients. However, to each client it appears as if they have their own server. This can range from under a hundred dollars to even several hundred dollars. Depending on the vendor, you could be one of for or five users on a physical server to one of twenty.

Leased hardware

At the range of $100 on up is the rented server. This is a single server rented by a client. It can range from a single processor server to two processors, and from 512 megabytes of memory to gigabytes. Some companies will even lease additional servers, firewalls and switches, essentially leasing your entire infrastructure. You get what you pay for, so a cheap server might be no better than the price equivalent virtual server.

Your own hardware

For about $150 on up you can rent a rack unit, a quarter cabinet or a whole cabinet in a data center. (A whole cabinet will usually be between $750 to $2,000 and consists of 40 or 42 rack units.) You buy the server and contract to find a “home” for it in a data center, where you either ship the server to the center or drop it off. You can buy whatever you can or want to afford, and have complete control.

What to do?

If you’re on the Cheap Hosting side, moving to a virtual server buys you a temporary, if any, reprieve. Moreover, you are now responsible for more of the server management. Once you move beyond the cheap hosting you are going to manage your own server, anyway. You should start looking at leased hardware or buying your own server.

Leasing hardware has some advantages. While the lessor will usually not support your custom installed software, they will support the operating system and common software they provide. They may also offer additional services, like automated backups. You won’t have to pay for an entire server up front, but you will pay for it, eventually.

However, you need to do your homework. I would only use recognized, well know vendor, with a solid reputation. Some less reputable companies have leased “name brand” servers in what they claim is a high end data center. Their customers discovered that they actually got a no-name server sitting on a baker’s rack (which is not even legal in some states). If they’re local, pay them a visit.

Buying your own hardware gives you ultimate control. It seems like a daunting proposition. You will spend a lot of money up front, a substantial amount each month, and on top of that be responsible for the server. A lot of people especially choke on the up front cost of the server. In addition, the sense it’s up to them and their small staff to keep the server running can seem overwhelming.

The upside is you have complete control. Unlike a leased server, which often comes with a choice of two or three operating systems, you can use whatever you like. You can load whatever software you choose on the server. This allows you as much control over your infrastructure as possible, short of your own server farm. Finally, there are several good choices for name brand data centers that will reliably host your server. However, a cheap data center is still a cheap data center.

Conclusion

If you’re outgrowing your server needs you should seriously only consider leased servers or buying your own server. Price wise, over a 2-3 year period, a high quality leased server is no cheaper than buying your own server. For example, I was quoted $599 a month for a medium grade server. That’s about 14,400 over a two year period. A better quality Sun server was just over $3,000, and we found a data center to host in for $350 a month for a quarter cabinet (space for 10 servers). That’s $11,400 vs. $14,400 and for a better server over two years. Over 3 years, it’s $15,600 versus $21,600.

Option	Cost	Quality	Capacity	Commitment
Cheap	$	*	*	*
Virtual Server	$$	**	*	***
Leased Server	$$$	***	***	***
Purchase Server	$$$	****	****	****

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