A Change in Paradigm: Dedicated Server

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I found it hard to believe, but suddenly I was faced with a ...
Well, I suppose most people would not consider it a ... quite the ...
in fact. However, it was ...
out c I found it hard to believe, but suddenly I was faced with a realproblem. Well, I suppose most people would not consider it a hugeproblem, quite the opposite, in fact.
However, it was stressingme out complete, interfering with my writing. I even had troublesleeping.What was this horrendous problem? My web site was becoming verypopular.
So popular, in fact, that I was getting very worriedabout bandwidth charges.You see, this was happening after September 11th, 2001, and I hadbeen reading about some people who had created very special andbeautiful sites. These sites were so incredible that theyattracted lots and lots of visitors.
So many visitors that theyreceived hundreds of gigabytes worth of traffic. The webmasterssuddenly found themselves charged hundreds or even thousands ofdollars for using bandwidth over their allocations.I had purchased a contract with a shared hosting service whichallowed 27gb/month of traffic.
This seemed like more than enoughat the time. However, I was noticing the bandwidth increasing atan alarming rate - about 2gb/day.
At that rate, I would exceedthe allotment by quite a bit. I had some time, but not much.Okay, what to do? I looked around at the various shared hostingoptions and didn't see much that was all that attractive.
Therewere some that offered "unlimited" bandwidth - I didn't trustthese at all. Most of the terms and conditions actually didplace a "reasonable" limit of some kind.
I preferred a limit thatwas know verses a limit that was unknown.Actually, truth be known, I was getting a little tired of thepaid host option. I mean, it's far improved from free hosts, butthere is still much room for improvement.
Some of the things thatwere bothering me were:Downtime - All of the shared hosting servers that I'd checkedout so far seemed to be down more often than desired. I've beenin the computer industry for over 23 years, and to me a few hoursof downtime in an entire year is about all that's acceptable.It's not that hard to achieve these kinds of statistics - I'vebeen doing it myself for years.Support - The level of support from virtually all hostingcompanies I've used to date has been pathetic to mediocre.
Myexpectation is simple. My site is down, I want someone to workon it quickly.
I want to call someone, get an answer right away,and get the problem resolved. Especially during normal businesshours.
I have never received that level of support from anyhosting company yet.Strange errors - I've noticed that my web sites will run finefor a few days or weeks, then start having strange delays. I knowthis because I monitor my sites with an automated service.
Thesedelays are probably caused by things that other customers aredoing on the same server.Lack of communication - Web host support people seem to forgetthat we webmasters and businessmen depend upon our web sites. Idon't know about you, but if my site goes down for any length oftime I completely freak out.
I want to know why it's down andwhat's being done about it. And virtually always I get noanswers.
This is most annoying when the downtime has been planned- these hosts have my email address, why is it so hard to send anemail and let me know what's going on?Log file issues - Log files are very important to any truewebmaster. They are useful for finding errors, gauging trafficand determining the success of promotions and articles.
Yet sofar all of the shared hosts gave me incredible grief about logfiles. They seemed to want to initialize them at odd intervals(unpredictable), didn't allow easy access, allowed too easy(unsecured) access and generally made it difficult.Okay, given all of that, it was time to make a change.
Not just achange to another host, but a change in paradigm. I had tried free hosts (three of them) before deciding they werenot at all suitable for anything except a small hobby web site.
Imoved up to paid shared hosts and for a while was happy. I moved,then moved again, then again.
The hosts were all fine for awhile, then starting having trouble.Shared hosting was not doing what I needed. The straw that brokethe camels back was a question of bandwidth.
Internet Tips andSecrets was exceeding 50gb a month (almost four million hits andthree quarters of a million page views). Wow.I could not find a shared host that offered a package of a fullgigabyte of disk and upwards of 50gb a month.
Not a single oneafter looking at over a hundred different packages.I had a real problem. You see, go over the monthly bandwidthcharge and you get smacked with huge overcharges.
For the webhost I had at the time, the charges were $6 per gigabyte. Thiswould make my hosting bill very large indeed.Thus I began looking for a dedicated hosting service.
I quicklyfound a company and purchased a single month.Here's what I got. A web server all to myself.
I could define asmany as 250 different web sites on the server, and I had completecontrol of the DNS. I had root access to the server (meaning Iwas more or less god on the box) and could literally do anythingI wanted.
I could install anything, do anything and control ornot control everything.I had 9gb of disk space. Best of all, the service provided awhooping 400gb of bandwidth usage per month.
The server wasextremely fast for my needs. All for around $200/month plus asetup fee.The downside (there is always a downside, isn't there)? The pricewas a little steep, but a predictable $200 a month is farsuperior to a surprise $500 or even $100 hosting charge.
Theyalso didn't provide any real autoresponders (but I solved that bypurchasing a package) or web based email. Their support is alsovery basic - they have a 24 hour help desk which is friendly andcompetent, but they do not appear to be technical heavyweights.Thus I have now, after a week of hard work, begun a newadventure - a dedicated web server for the 16 sites that my wifeand I own.
So far, the experience is far superior to the sharedhosting nightmares that I've been facing. Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .