Dedicated Server Hardware - How much is too much?

Your ISP will more than likely provide you with a rather lengthy list of possible hardware configurations for your dedicated server. Obviously, your costs will increase proportionally with your server’s configuration.

The question is: How much is too much?

In order to get to the bottom of this dilemma, you must first ask yourself a few basic questions about the nature of your intended hosting capabilities. For example, will your machine host many sites that are multi-media intensive? Do you plan on hosting dynamic sites that will be database driven with pages generated “on the fly” -or do you prefer to stick with the more traditional, static content -hand coded and uploaded via FTP?

For most small web developers with traditional sites, storage capacity is not a major concern. Static text requires very little disk space and even the most cost effective server configurations feature at least a 60GB hard drive. The only concern in this scenario is the ubiquitous background features that can slowly eat away at your storage capacity while you sleep. For example, your server will compile various logs –regardless of which Operating System and web server platform you choose to use. Not rotating your logs on a machine that experiences heavy traffic can easily result in many Megabytes of wasted space –even in the case of sites that have very little content.

On the other hand, multi-media intensive and database driven sites require larger storage capacities for obvious reasons. Much like your logs, your database(s) will continue to swell with a wide variety of information not logged anywhere else and could balloon out of control without regular maintenance. Obviously, you might want to look into purchasing a larger hard drive if you intend to develop a database intensive host.

This brings us to the question of available memory in your server. Again, simple static sites require very little hardware at all, but database driven sites can quickly become memory hogs. Each database request represents a small portion of memory becoming unavailable to other users and a single user can be responsible for multiple requests all with the click of a button. Factor in a few thousand users and it soon becomes clear how important a large memory bank can be.

The good news is, you really only need your server for it’s storage and data processing abilities. Unlike a Personal Computer, you will never have a need for extensive peripherals like keyboards, mice, monitors, sound cards and high-end video cards. If your ISP allows you to completely customize the hardware configuration of your dedicated server, you can comfortably skip these options and focus solely on the CPU, RAM and storage capacity of your machine.

Contrary to popular belief, the speed of your server’s CPU does not always impact the performance of your hosting abilities. Most low-cost servers are bundled with AMD chips that start in the range of 1.3GHz. This should be adequate for almost any collection of small to medium sized sites –regardless of content. In most instances, your CPU will be bottlenecked by other factors such as “net congestion” and disk access anyway. But it’s worth noting that many database functions for instance, can be floating point intensive. Thus, just like those little plots of memory that are used up by database requests, little chunks of your CPU’s processing power can be swallowed up by similar requests. In this case, “bigger” actually can equal “better”.

In short, despite the myriad of hardware configurations offered by your average ISP, all you need to concern yourself with are hard disk drive size, memory size and processor speed and your needs in these three areas can easily be determined by considering the nature of the sites you intend to host.

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