If you are going to launch a startup, you know that every dollar counts and you need to use opportunities smartly to establish decent company reputation. This is why many startups look for dedicated server or cloud server hosting models to develop their websites.
Although some recommend Infrastructure as a Service or using a private cloud above company’s own infrastructure, these solutions are not easy to deploy: it takes much money and effort. Typical choices for startups are collocation in a third party datacenter, public cloud or dedicated server web hosting. How to make the right decision?
Selection of provider and hosting infrastructure
When making the decision, it’s important to take into account the quality and character of infrastructure used in every case. It is defined not only by specifications and storage resources, but also by the quality of hardware and the network. Redundancy also differs from one web hosting solution to another.
Redundancy means that every component of the infrastructure is replicated twice, so you dedicated server or another server solution will function even in case of failure. The best web hosting services offer 100% redundancy and power uptime SLA. High power and redundancy are main reasons why on-premise data centers are not cost efficient – they require huge investment, which is not agreeable for startups.
For the same reason, human resources (solution designers, system administrators) also appear to be inefficient solution. Not every startup can afford having a specialist on hand for required amount of hours. Therefore, it’s more convenient and less costly to rely on third-party datacenters and service “on demand”.
Another crucial aspect is flexibility that every company (both startups and well-established enterprise) needs. If you need to scale up and down as server demands grow or spike, a cloud server or hybrid dedicated-cloud environment will work perfectly for you. That’s because you can scale freely according to your needs while paying for the resources that your website or application actually uses.
Choosing between cloud and dedicated servers
To start your search, make up a list of the factors (level of redundancy, additional services available, power SLA, quality of infrastructure) and your requirements. As soon as you find several reliable server hosting services, select how much storage resources and computing power you need.
The best web hosting companies offer a wide choice of dedicated server configurations and specifications of computing resources (CPU, RAM, types of hard drive and RAID options for security). With a dedicated server, all resources will belong only to you, and you will have complete control over the environment.
Cloud servers come for lower prices and, consequently, less storage resources and level of computing. Pretty often, virtualization is used to allocate resources to several users, which makes it cheaper. But such approach takes its toll: users have less stable performance and lower security level.
To sum up, cloud servers with a wide range of features are optimal for smaller websites and applications with variable workload. Dedicated servers are suitable for high traffic websites, huge databases, private cloud environments and hosting several websites.
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