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Renting A Server


Graeme

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Hello All,

I did not realise that you could rent a server, could anyone offer me some information. I understand you may be provided with an interface to manage the server but how much is a reasonable cost? If you rent a server can you charge to host other web sites? Thank you ad always,

Best wishes,

Graeme

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There are many ways to skin that server rental cat:

 

  • colocation servers: where you give them a physical box to stick in the host facilities so that you can take advantage of their pipes to the interwebs, redundant power supply and perhaps some limited tech support. Since it is not their hardware and possibly not an OS they know ... they may not want to provide much in the way of tech support. You have to really know what you are doing.
     
  • rent a box: this is the traditional method, where you actually rent not only a connection but you rent an actual physical server as well ... many times these are blade servers.This is a good option since they will be able to provide support ... since it is their hardware and they will have installed server software that they know.
     
  • Virtual/cloud hosting: best if you want to start small and be able to scale quickly. But once you get traffic it is cheaper to go with option #2.  The advantage of cloud hosting is that the initial cost can be much lower since they charge by the request. Another advantage is that it is really fast to set up and expand.

I've been using option #2 for 8 yrs now and before I actually had my own ADSL connection coming into my place where I had power backups and servers going in my closet! Best move I made was to subcontract that out!

 

I used to run Microsoft IIS web servers but now we are on Linux. 

 

Oh yea ... they all provide easy to use control panels these days so you don't really need to know Linux and SSH ... although that helps. Control panels that are popular include:

 

- Plesk

- WHM from CPANEL

 

 

Hope that helps,

Stef

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One last note:

 

If you plan on offering hosting to your web design clients ... think twice! It is a tight margin business where you will get lots of tech support request related to clients not knowing how to configure their email and of course ... they will blame you and tie up your day with endless phone calls.

 

:o

 

Web hosting can make sense if you have a lot of clients ... say 1000+. The problem is that there are so many hosting companies these days that it has to be your focus if you want to survive. 

 

Having your own servers for app deployment can't be beat though, since you have so much control.

Stef

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