What to pay attention to while choosing dedicated server?

If you decided to come from shared hosting to dedicated server the following advices should help you to make correct choice. So what should you pay attention to while choosing new dedicated server?

Tecnhology side:

• operating system - the most wide-spread variants here are Windows, Linux and FreeBSD;
• RAM amount - the resource hungry technologies such as Windows, MySQL, Java and Ruby require good amounts of RAM;
• performance and bandwidth - high-loaded servers may require several processors and also you should choose provider with good bandwidth for your tasks if you work for example with media;
• server managing status - if you don’t have experience in server administration choose the managed one and focus on your business;
• hardware replacement guarantee - many companies guarantee hardware replacement in certain times.

Other requirements:

• ability to recover after disasters;
• scalability options;
• working with files of big size;
• security status - protection from DDoS-attacks, ability to set up VPN;
• high availability.

Pricing policy:

• the software license costs;
• hardware upgrade costs;
• scalability options and pricing;
• the cost of migration to your new dedicated servers.