How to Choose a Cheap Dedicated Server

In dedicated server hosting, the client enterprise rents an entire server so that its resources like bandwidth, disk space, memory and processing power are exclusively used by that enterprise. This makes dedicated hosting more reliable as compared to shared hosting plans or VPS hosting plans. You will find many providers offering quality dedicated servers for their clients, but not all providers are trustworthy. So, choosing a trustworthy but affordable dedicated server hosting provider can be a challenging and time-consuming task. 

• When choosing a provider, you need to ensure that it can support both Linux and Windows dedicated servers. When your website runs Windows applications like ASP or ASP.NET, you will need Windows servers. Linux servers are slightly cheaper in comparison because Linux is an open source platform and there are no licensing fees. When you plan to host flash videos or images, you will need multi-processor servers like the dual Xeon servers.

• You must also decide whether you want fully managed dedicated hosting or unmanaged hosting. The latter is the cheaper alternative because the task of maintaining and securing the dedicated server rests with the client enterprise. When you sign up for fully managed dedicated hosting, the provider will be responsible for buying, monitoring and securing your server; they will troubleshoot all server-related issues.

• When choosing cheap dedicated hosting, you must obviously consider the prices of dedicated hosting plans from different providers. For this, you need to verify their monthly costs, installation costs, software licensing fees etc. You should also ideally find out about the costs of updates and upgrades, prices that you may have to bear for additional memory or additional storage. Before you sign up, you need to also consider the technical supports offered by these monthly packages; extra support is usually chargeable by the hour. Likewise, you may be expected to pay more when you have additional web traffic; so, you should ideally check the amount of Internet traffic that is included in the package you have bought. Besides, there are charges for scaling resources up during traffic surges and downtime costs, migration expenses and decommissioning costs.

• Before choosing a dedicated server, it is important to evaluate your business needs and activities. You must find out about the providers’ backup provisions and disaster recovery plans, the degree of scalability they are ready to provide, and of course the hardware quality. Since you rent an entire server in dedicated hosting, it is necessary to ensure that you are paying so much money for superior quality hardware and not outdated components. So, you should search for dedicated servers from branded manufacturers like Dell or HP.

• Finally, your dedicated server provider must be able to guarantee you round-the-clock technical supports through live chats, emails and phone calls. It may be a good idea to sign up with a web host that gives a free trial version to test their services and response times. 

Using these criteria, you should be able to find a quality dedicated server hosting provider. You should also find out about their hardware replacement guarantees, reviews their Service Level Agreements and their capability to support all kinds of operating systems to be sure your website performance gets a boost.