Moving your website or internal applications to a dedicated server is a big, long-term decision. You may be already thinking about it or have not considered it all. Depending on what your needs are as a business, a dedicated serving solution may be perfect for you. Here are some things to think of, framed through my own experience recently getting my own dedicated server with Blacknight.
Do You need room to breathe?
Shared hosting works great when you’re just starting out. But when your website grows and starts to get more traffic, it can start to creak under the strain of shared hosting limits. For example, say you end up getting featured on the local news – the traffic boost can make your website hit its resource limits and go offline. Or your website may have a lot of content and may run up against storage limits. One of my own content websites has almost 100GB of data from over ten years of uploads. That’s more than most shared hosting can handle. With a dedicated server, you have room to breathe because you’re not sharing space or resources with other websites. If you get a traffic spike, your server will handle it as long as it’s configured correctly (we can help with that). If you have a lot of files, you’ll have plenty of space to grow.
Security and Firewall Protection
While good shared hosting, like Blacknight offers, will be very secure thanks to our crack team of engineers, the feeling of security by sharing a server with thousands of other websites is not as great. With a dedicated server, you have complete security. Only you have access to your server, and you don’t have to worry about the security best practices of other people and corporations. You only have to worry about your own. And with a dedicated server with Blacknight, you can get our specialised firewall that is constantly monitored for abuse. If you need a customised firewall, Blacknight can help you there. Your dedicated server with Blacknight will be very secure. You can also use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) for secure communications and file transfers, no matter where you and your employees are.
Sovereignty and EU-hosting
Where you keep your data is very important. And the sovereignty of that data is even more important these days. Now that the UK is leaving the EU, it’s forced many European companies to re-evaluate where they want their data to live. UK companies are also looking for data centres in English-speaking countries to park their operations that deal with the rest of the EU. Europe has led the way in consumer privacy protection and keeping your customers’ data within the EU is a strong selling point for Irish-based hosting. It also keeps the data from being under the jurisdiction of other countries like the United States, which has a very different attitude to consumer privacy (and 50 different states with 50 different sets of privacy laws). By hosting your dedicated server with Blacknight in one of our Irish data centres, you keep your data in a free and open society, under EU data protection laws.
Operating System Freedom
With your own dedicated server, you can choose which operating system you want to use – and if you have several servers, you can mix your production environment to whatever platform you need. Blacknight offers the most popular Linux flavours along with Windows. You can pick whatever one you need to optimise your production environment. With shared or VPS hosting, you’re stuck with whatever OS your hosting provider has picked for you. With dedicated, you can choose.
Greater Performance
With a dedicated server, you can customise the hardware you need. Need more RAM? Need a bigger hard drive? Want a faster CPU? You can get whatever you think you’ll need to make the most of your server environment. Don’t know what you’re going to need? We can discuss your specific needs and build the hardware profile tailored to your requirements. And as you’re not sharing server resources with thousands of other websites, when you get a big traffic spike, or a major event happens, then your server will be ready for it. CPU-intensive tasks like sending mass emails or media rendering will be no problem for it at all.
Fixed Costs
With a dedicated server solution from Blacknight, you can be assured of what your monthly, quarterly, and yearly data hosting costs will be. With shared and cloud VPS solutions or with Amazon Web Services, your month-to-month cost can be unpredictable because your resources are metered and charged for your usage. This is great when you don’t need much, but when your website or business grows to a certain size, you can get surprisingly crushing bills at the end of the month. We’ve all signed up for Amazon S3 thinking it was a cheap solution to a problem we were having, only to get a $300 bill the next month because we couldn’t predict something. With a dedicated server, you pay for the equipment, and you pay for a healthy transfer allowance. You will likely not utilise all of it, but there won’t be any billing surprises there.
Freedom
With a dedicated server, you have freedom; many different kinds of freedom. First, you’re hosted in Ireland, a free and open country with strong consumer and data protection laws. If you’re currently hosted in a country that has tough restrictions on what you can do online (such as censorship of news and information), you can make all that go away by coming to Ireland. You have more freedom to do what you want on the server – you have flexibility based on the operating system and software you choose to use. You have room to grow with various hard drive sizes, and you can have a custom amount of RAM to make sure you future proof your resource needs. With a dedicated server, you have more freedom to experiment (and to succeed and to fail).
Availability
With a dedicated server with Blacknight, you get availability. What does that mean? We guarantee power uptime of 99.99%, meaning your equipment will rarely ever go offline. We also guarantee a 99.99% network uptime. Disruptions are extremely rare. Your website and your infrastructure are always ready and waiting for what’s needed. We can also get your new server setup within days of ordering. We’ll have you online and operating as soon as you need it.
Speed
With your Blacknight dedicated server in our data centre, you get SPEED. Not only will the hardware on your server be able to handle whatever you throw at it, but your connections to the internet are also the fastest out there. Your server is usually connected to our network with a 1Gbps port (one gigabit of data a second), or you can upgrade to 10Gbps. Our core network runs with multiple 10Gbps uplinks to the various peering exchanges. Whichever of our four data centre locations you choose to place your server, each one is connected to the internet with the fastest available connections.
Have questions about dedicated hosting or want to talk about your organisation’s specific needs and requirements? Then get in touch with the Blacknight Sales team today.
About the Author: Jonathan Thomas
