subject: Shopping for a Dedicated Server, one of the most important decisions your business will make [print this page] Shopping for a Dedicated Server, one of the most important decisions your business will make
Dedicated servers gives one the peace of mind that he or she is the absolute only person running any sort of application on the given server. Server hardware is undoubtedly the most important aspect of any server, whether you're looking at purchasing or leasing managed servers or dedicated servers. One should take very careful consideration when looking into a dedicated server or managed server host. First, and foremost, you need to be sure that all of the essential parts of the server are high quality parts and that they are up to par when you look at the industry standard.
One of the first things that one should check is the processor that will be powering the machine. You will see processors ranging from Intel Atoms to Intel Core i7 processors. Don't ignore processor speed though! There are tons of different types of processors from each family to choose from, so make sure you have a experienced consultant working with you so that you get exactly what you need, and not overkill or under buy.
The second thing that you will usually need to look at after you figure out what processor family you need and how many gigahertz I need it to have is how much RAM you will have at the fingertips of your web application. Luckily in the world of dedicated servers, this is generally a completely customizable feature. Most servers now-a-days start at about 2GB of RAM and go up to as much as 16GB and some go even higher than that to up to 32GB! To be honest, most web applications need no more than 4GB of RAM, but feel free to ask for more if you need it!
Next, be sure to look at the hard disk space that you will get. Like RAM, this feature is almost always completely customizable. One should know that the industry standard for server HDDs as far as connection goes is SATA. SATA is short for Serial ATA and has the capability of transferring data up to 6GBps, so you'll never have to worry about your internet connection flooding your drive, now will you?
Again, depending on what type of web application you are going to be running, you will want to be sure that you have at least a 10Mbps line or 100Mbps. At times you will even see internet connection speeds up to 1Gbps which is usually a major overkill for most applications. If you are not familiar with converting megabits to megabytes, view the following:
MBps = Megabytes per second
Mbps = Megabits per second
GBps = Gigabytes per second
Gbps = Gigabits per second
A 100Mbps link will be able to transfer 12.5 megabytes each second, while a 1Gbps link will be able to transfer up to 128 megabytes per second. On the other hand, be mindful that a 10Mbps link will only be able to transfer data up to about 1.25 megabytes per second, which is pretty slow for most web applications that are popular or highly used.
One of the last things that you will need to consider is bandwidth consumption. Again, these days, this is an extremely cheap commodity. Due to the internet boom, this is usually measured in either gigabytes or terabytes. Many of the packages that are around today, range from a starting 2000 gigabyte up to very high numbers, into 5000 and sometime even higher.
All of these aspects play a huge role in choosing managed servers or dedicated servers for your application to run on.
