What is the cheapest dedicated hosting service offer you have ever seen? Do you expect to get leased a dedicated server for $30 per month?
Daw Web Hosting blog has published at least three different articles which cover the trends on shared web hosting market. I believe that so called budget web hosting has become so cheap that the only thing anyone that still cost something is the providers’ brands and the way they provide customer support. I hope hard times will not come so fast for the shared hosts, which give their best every day to implement new marketing tricks to sell.
Dedicated Hosting Is Going Cheap
But there is also a different view. The hard times has already come for shared hosts. Lets repeat the question – “What is the cheapest dedicated hosting service offer you have ever seen?”. Is it $29.95 or $49.95 per month? I’ve seen offers like those above. Well it was an offer for AMD 2000+, 256 MB DDR RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive and 200 GB monthly transfer.
Anyone can find a growing number of companies that offer an industry level web hosting solutions at the price twice less than your monthly coffee budget. I can understand entry-level Internet users who decide to build a web site for fun. It is reasonable any of them to pay for web hosting as less they can. Is it the same however with server owners?
Why does anyone need a server? There would be many reasons. If you own a growing web site business where you have one or more popular web sites you may need more flexible and customized solution to manage them. But looking for reliability means that you can afford it. If you make 10,000 – 20,000 dollar per month from your online business then you need to make sure you’re using very reliable service.
Smaller online businesses usually decide to get a dedicated or managed server, depends of their owners skills. The main question here is not the same as the owner of shared hosting account would ask? “How much does it cost?” is very important but not crucial question for anyone who needs a dedicated server. The more important here is the uptime and performance of the dedicated server, not the price.
How can you benefit of the cheap price if your server goes down once or twice a month. Let’s say your main e-commerce web site takes a lot of server processor’s resources and it is visited by 10,000 different people (unique visitors) every day. Would you put your business on risk only to save $50 or $100 per month? If the answer is “Yes”, than I have to apologize that I’m wasting your time!
The price of any dedicated hosting service includes the cost of the machine and saves money to the customer. A good entry level server costs from $900 for a machine assembled from a small server vendor, to a few thousands of dollars for a Dell, HP or IBM product. So no one shall expect to get a reliable server with powerful processor (Intel Pentium D 2.8 GHz or equivalent AMD powered machine) and at least 1GB RAM for less than $250 per month.
There are some companies like EV1.net that release promotional series which can be bought at low price.
How to calculate the price?
When you need to get a dedicated server choose the specification first and try to find how much does it cost a machine like this one you want to lease. If the retail price of the server is for example $1500 and you can get it the same machine as dedicated server for $250 per month, then it is reasonable to get it. A reliable collocation service will cost you at least $75 per month if you don’t need to much bandwidth.
So it is worth to get a dedicated server because the cheapest colocation requires $1600 down payment (it doesn’t worth to get a single server on credit). When you get a leased dedicated server you can upgrade it any time or change it with another more powerful one. It is not the same when you own the server.
When you online business is growing up it is a good idea to use your own machine. But it is also important to calculate your cost and not to underestimate the troubles that may come if you decide to save a couple of dollars per month.