Dedicated Servers

A server is simply a computer that provides other computers with services and information; for example, a business critical application such as the e-mail system may be placed on a single PC and other computers connect to it when the user is sending or accessing their e-mail.

A PC at a workstation in your business may act as a server for other machines, which are known as “clients,” though it can also be used as an individual PC in its own right if it is not being utilized heavily.

If you are uncertain about what a server is in the context of this article, just consider it as a PC that has extremely large amounts of memory and can be used much as your office PC, except it tends to be faster and often fits in a rack, rather than on your desk.

A dedicated server is one that is used only by you and no other third party; it may be hosted at your business location or in a third party hosting center. A shared server is one where you share the server with several other business users.

Which route you take will depend firstly on your budget, and secondly on the need for security.

A dedicated server is yours, and you have exclusive use to the “box,” so you will pay a higher price for a dedicated server, compared to a shared service where you will effectively be splitting the cost with several other users.

A dedicated server becomes the preferred route, if you are looking at using substantially all the box or at least sufficient space to justify having your own dedicated server, compared to paying a roughly equivalent amount for shared space.

If the applications that are being hosted on a server are business critical or have a security aspect, such as an e-commerce site located on it, then you will also want to go down the dedicated server route, as you control who has access to the server. As a result, you will have the ability to hop around other parts of the box, rather than having several unknown users sharing the server with you.

You may also prefer a dedicated server, simply because your business image may be compromised, if you suddenly find your shared server is hosting an adult website or otherwise unsavory enterprise, such as a spam producing application, which in turn will reflect upon your own business.

The rest of this article will assume you are looking at using a dedicated server rather than a shared server.

An issue you will have to decide upon is where to physically locate your dedicated server, at your business location or elsewhere.

This may seem an unusual question to ask, since you probably hold your stock at your warehouse and other company assets at your business location, so why look at hosting a dedicated server somewhere else?

If you consider what would happen to your business if you had a fire or a burglary, for example, initially you would have a degree of business disruption, but hopefully you would be able to at least operate around the event and continue trading and get back to normal.

Now think about what would happen if a dedicated server that hosts your business e-mail, website, customer database, and accounting package was damaged or removed in such an event – how quickly can you recover from that happening?

Dedicated servers are also intricate and complex pieces of machinery that do not tend to do well outside of controlled environments and require a fair degree of technical support that you may not very well possess in-house.

It makes sense to house a dedicated server outside your usual place of business in order to minimize the effects of an adverse event such as a break-in, and a whole industry has built up around “Disaster Recovery” for businesses.

Dedicated server hosting at a specialist hosting center can provide the physical environment for protecting and maintaining your hardware, with on-site technical support, back-up power systems, and specialist building construction to ensure environmental effects do not disrupt a dedicated servers uptime. If you are wondering what that means in plain English, just consider what would happen if lightening struck the building and caused a power surge – would your current business location be able to protect a business critical dedicated server under those circumstances?

The term “managed” in this context is freely interchangeable from hosting center to hosting center, so tread carefully when appraising the alternatives.

Ideally, you should look for the following in a managed dedicated server solution such as regular back-ups, regular monitoring (known as “pinging”) to ensure the dedicated server is online and running, maintaining the physical “box,” maintaining the peripheral connections; i.e., power supply and back-up generator facility and the connection or “pipe,” either to your location or more usually to the internet.

Look for a dedicated server hosting center that will offer you a QoS agreement (Quality of Service), providing you with a degree of security that your server uptime will be maximized, while downtime for maintenance or external disruption such as power failure is kept to a minimum.

A good sign to look for is whether the dedicated server hosting center provides you with a precise listing of what they are responsible for and what is not covered. This frequently looks off putting to a non-technical buyer, almost user unfriendly, but in fact, it is a positive, as it demonstrates a real level of understanding as to what their job actually is. Read it carefully and compare it directly to other service providers, and if they do not offer a QoS, use the one you do have to ask pertinent questions; e.g., what server uptime do you guarantee? Who is responsible for maintaining the firewall? Will you be providing a new server or a reconditioned one?

Server colocation facilities, also known as “colo's” or “carrier hotels,” provide similar services as a dedicated server hosting center in that there is on-site technical support, dedicated Internet connectivity, and administrative services to ensure uptime of the hardware.

The major difference between server colocation and dedicated server hosting is ownership of the hardware and facilities. With a dedicated server, you are renting the hardware and paying a third party for support and management services to a pre-agreed standard; whereas, with a colocation facility, the hardware and facilities are owned by the users. The actual facilities will, in fact, be owned by a number of different business users and a good analogy is a condominium for servers.

Server colocation involves several users sharing the cost of technical support, facilities, Internet connectivity, and other data center infrastructure, and provides economies of scale to business users. Typically, business users tend to be web based e-commerce companies and enterprise class organizations that are looking to free up their own networks and take advantage of the cost savings.

Server colocation is for the serious enterprise class business user that has the budget to invest the financial outlay to build a data center. This is typically beyond the budget of many companies, unless they have a dedicated web business that requires colocation facilities.

For the majority of businesses, dedicated server hosting provides the route to a financially viable business solution to ensuring security and dedicated server uptime for their purposes.

The growth in server colocation is typically amongst the enterprise class business market, and this sector is still maturing, compared to dedicated server hosting centers that have been around for over a decade now. The level of managed services that can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of server colocation investment provides a broadly comparable level of service for even the small business.

Managed dedicated server hosting providers tend to be negotiable on what exactly they will provide for you, even providing support for business critical applications such as e-mail, accounting software applications, and other business solutions, generally known as ASP (Application Service Providers).

Ensuring that your business information and applications are secure from unauthorized intrusion is one of the most sensitive areas in managing your IT resources. Enormous amounts of effort and money are expended in trying to keep these systems secure, and how security conscious you are will in large part be determined by how critical the business needs for your IT resources are.

Running alongside security issues is the business imperative to keep your network up and running as much of the time as possible, and especially when you need the network to deliver. Duplicating systems or arranging for redundancy is usually referred to as “Disaster Recovery,” and more recently as “Business Continuity.”

In both instances, the objective is pretty much the same, to maintain business integrity and access to the network for users and clients.

If you have the in-house skill set to ensure technically that you are able to maintain and establish IT security and continuity, you will probably be looking at the cost savings that maybe obtained by server collocation, because other businesses, perhaps trusted partners already, will be looking to achieve the same as you.

If you are unable to handle the cost of collocation, then it is equally likely that your company is not of a size where it can deliver the technical expertise necessary to protect the IT infrastructure, and outsourcing this aspect of your operation makes good commercial and economic sense. Dedicated servers, hosted by specialist dedicated server hosting centers, will be able to replicate enterprise class security and business continuity at a greatly reduced cost. It will pay dividends, however, to closely look at potential service providers to ensure they can actually deliver the service you need. Remember, you are effectively handing over control of the hardware to an external third party.

Sharing a server, as opposed to a dedicated server arrangement, is not really an appropriate business solution for a company that is looking to develop a serious web presence or is serious about client security.

Server colocation provides the means to maximize connectivity, as the business users select the size of connection, as well as how many physical connection points to the data center there will be. Serious web and e-commerce hosting tends to take place at colocation centers, simply because of the high speeds and redundant connectivity they offer. Though large savings can be achieved through the economies of scale, this is more than many business budgets can run to.

Dedicated server hosting centers, in comparison, are able to offer similar facilities as a server colocation center; however, more users will be utilizing the connection, or limits will be placed upon the volume of traffic by the hosting center itself through their Acceptable Usage Policy. Pay attention to how much bandwidth you are allowed to use in order to avoid any unpleasant surprises when the invoice comes through the door.

In terms of the amount of uptime you can experience, a server colocation facility will probably provide greater uptime, simply because these centers tend to be used by the telecommunication companies providing the Internet backbone themselves. For practical business purposes, however, this may simply be splitting hairs, as a dedicated server-hosting center will in all likelihood be able to guarantee 99.99% uptime in any event.

For many businesses, server colocation will be prohibitively expensive, and the business needs to be of a size where it has already developed in-house the technical skills and infrastructure that can serve the network. Businesses that look to use server colocation tend to be turning to it, as they are already expending large amounts of money and time on network maintenance and are looking to save costs by buying into a facility that offers economies of scale and enhanced performance that are crucial to their business.

For all but very small businesses, dedicated servers hosted in specialist dedicated server hosting centers, provide the ideal compromise between business performance and budgetary constraints. A managed dedicated server, backed by a good QoS and Service Level Agreement (SLA), will provide enterprise class security, speed, and flexibility at a fraction of the cost of a server colocation center.