Tech
Hosting part 2: Dedicate yourselves.
When is dedicated hosting right for your app?
Tomislav Simnett
2 min read
In our second part of our hosting blog series, we’re looking at Dedicated hosting, and what it means.
What does dedicated hosting mean?
Simply put, dedicated hosting means having hardware dedicated to one website or one application. Nothing else sits on that server, such as other websites that can interfere, or use up precious resources. There are a number of scenarios that suit dedicated hosting and it is usually relevant for the larger scale websites rather than smaller ones.
Let’s say for example that you’re expecting your site to get hundreds and thousands of hits in the first few days. You might want to look at getting at least a dedicated server, if not a cluster of them to handle the load that the machine will experience.
But again, this depends on the site itself. If it’s just a single page site with nothing but static flash or HTML to load, you’ll manage a huge amount of throughput on a relatively low-performance machine. It’s all the database calls and all the dynamic data and the lack of being able to cache it a lot of the time that makes a server seem slow or even make it give up!
Managing your server
Again, this is ultimately going to be a decision that needs to be made between the strategists for the project, the developers and the server admins. They’ll tell you if you need it or if you need something more or less than just a single dedicated machine. And it’ll cost money for a good service. You’ll normally want to get the server managed for you if you don’t have your own admins that can keep it up to date and patched regularly.
A single dedicated server will often cost more for the hardware than a similarly specified virtual machine, but with it comes the knowledge that you’re not sharing any resources with other virtual machines. There is nothing wrong with either approach. It just depends on the requirements of the application.
If you’ve got a site you’re expecting a lot of hits to, or you know it’s a big application and it needs something beefy to run it, your best bet is usually going to be dedicated. Just be prepared to stump up for it.
In the next article, I’ll go into the virtual servers. Stay tuned.
How much capacity is your business leaving behind?
Use the calculator to estimate what slow processes, manual work and disconnected systems could really be costing you.
More posts.
View all
Business
Four interruptions, two lost hours and the process your people shouldn’t be driving
Four interruptions can wipe nearly two hours from the useful part of a working day, and that’s before you count the interruption itself. Add long manual processes, routine human error, rework and stress, and you get a working environment where good people spend too much time recovering, correcting and chasing.
The answer isn’t to tell people to focus harder. It’s to design a better system, one that drives the process, preserves context, moves routine work automatically and only interrupts people when their judgement is genuinely needed.
Tomislav Simnett
10 min read
Business
The approval takes five minutes. The waiting costs far more.
A five-minute approval can leave work waiting for days. Once a quote, purchase, job or invoice misses its slot, the delay spreads into the rest of the process.
People switch tasks, schedules move, customers wait and cash arrives later. The decision itself may be quick, but the queue around it can cost far more than anyone realises.
Tomislav Simnett
9 min read
Business
You probably don’t need a CRM; you need the work to flow properly.
Most growing businesses think they need a CRM, but the real problem usually sits between departments.
When sales, operations and finance all rely on different systems, spreadsheets and good people end up holding the process together by hand.
When sales, operations and finance all rely on different systems, spreadsheets and good people end up holding the process together by hand.
Tomislav Simnett
6 min read