Choosing dedicated servers

The process of choosing a new dedicated server host can be difficult for both a professional and beginners alike and so should be down sloly otherwise you may regret it. There is a number of steps that you need to plan and write down to start with. buy dedicated servers


What is the Server for?

You should be aware of this but not everyone is. How about e-commerce and webhosting, game servers, disaster recovery or just a download mirror? As will need to know what your going to run on this server from both what operating system to the software and the services. To ensure you don’t buy something completely overkill that will cost you a fortune but also doesn’t want to buy something that is under powered and will not run reliably.


Hardware

Now you have the software, you can move on to actually drafting the specification needed. Money is going to be kept out of the equation for the moment until your ready to find a host, but each specification will vary depending on usage. The main things to watch out for is the number of physical CPU’s and how many cores they have as many providers now off dual or quad core as the norm. RAM is possibly more important than CPU’s but try not to scrimp as the end user will not appreciate a sluggish server when what they are doing is the most important thing in the world. Storage space is going to be determined by what your using it for but again don’t try and get the smallest drive possible as it won’t allow for expansion,how is your backups going to be stored if its the same server then a separate disk would be highly recommended. You could opt for a RAID array in 0, 1, 10 or 5 depending on what you’re doing with the server.


Connectivity

Now you know what your server is running hardware wise you will then need to think about the bandwidth or data transfer allowance. Normally this is shown as gigabytes, and is normally hard to work out how much you need.A host like Melbourne will be able to help calculate how much bandwidth you might need, as when you run out there will be a charge or your server may be restricted till the end of the billing period.Next we have to find a good host with our specification in mind. I was told once the best way to find a good host is to obtain a computing mazazine and remove all the glossy adds for server hosting and then see what you have left as it won’t be companies who tend to offer great prices but the customer services tend to be lacking some what. Using a quick search for some hosting forums and putting a number of posts up requesting for some product offers from companies and getting some reviews from other users to base you decision upon and will then normally get the best value for money.