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Choosing a good but affordable dedicated server can be complicated and time-consuming, so we’ve made it a little easier for you. Following below is a complete guide on choosing the best dedicated server for you, taking into account your technology needs, financial constraints, business requirements, with also reviews of dedicated server offers. 

1. Dedicated Server Configuration

Here is a list of criterias you have to gather to get an accurate assessment of your technology needs:

• OS: if you use ASP.NET or MS SQL Server, you obviously need a Windows Dedicated Server. If you use an open source stack such as Apache/php/mysql or Ruby On Rails, a Linux server is the best choice. 
• Web Server and Database Server: depending on your technology stack, you might need a server with plenty of RAM, especially if the architecture builds upon Windows, Java or Ruby. 
• Performance: for SQL servers, video-transcoding severs, servers used for virtualization, or specialized servers such as game or chat servers, you need fast, multi-core processors or ideally multi-processors servers, such as dual xeon servers.
• Bandwidth: if you plan to host images, multimedia files such as flash videos, or an Asterisk server, bandwidth provided by the hosting provider is a key criteria
• Management: if you lack expert sys admins at hand to manage your server, you should look at advanced managed services. A good web hosting company should be able to offer you expert advice on how to do load balancing or web clusters, as well as good support. 
• Network: depending on the audience and geographical location of your web service, you should look closely at the location of the data center. How is the latency? How is the consistency and quality of uplinks? 

2. Prices

Of course, technology requirements needs to be weighed against available financial resources:

• Monthly price of server
• Potential Setup costs, for installing and configuring the server
• Software license purchases and monthly costs of software, such as OS, database or virtualization software. If you use Unix, or a Linux stack (Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, etc.), you can get rid of this criteria.
• Costs for updates, accessories, and parts, such as new RAM or new hard disks setups
• Hourly Costs for additional service, needed for unplanned outages, OS crashes, etc.
• Costs for bandwidth overuse

You also need to compute other costs, which are often overlooked: scalability costs (how are you going to plan once you reach the maximum capacity of your dedicated server), failure costs, technology training for your staff, backup and recovery, as well as migration and decomissionning costs (do your web hosting provider charges you if you cancel the server?).  As with the other costs listed above, they might have one-time and recurrent costs (most of the time on a monthly basis). 

Once all those costs are computed, you will often find out that offerings between different dedicated servers providers may differ easily from a factor of 10. Total Cost of Ownership is key to find the best value for your money; adding to the fact that doing business with a competitive, trusted, and proven web hosting company is essential for your long-term success.

3. Business Requirements

Depending on your field of business, you might have to follow a few requirements:

• Requirements for e-commerce businesses: secure access to the dedicated servers and integrity of data
• Additional security requirements, such as firewalls or protection against Distributed DOS attacks, or the possibility of setting up a VPN,
• High availability
• Disaster recovery
• Scalability, factoring in growth of your web services
• Providing services such as emails, calendaring, or directories for a business
• Management of large-sized files
• etc.

After you’ve made the list of technology needs, financial costs, and business requirements, you are now ready to “shop” for dedicated servers.

Let’s take the example of a small software company launching a resource reservation website, which uses Ruby On Rails and other open source software:

From this set of requirements, a Linux dedicated server as listed here under the Core2 Duo panel (Core2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, 160GB SATA 2, 1500GB Bandwidth) seems a great fit, available at $100/month, with CentOS 64bits, ssh access, etc.

As a reference,  possible configurations for C & D (dedicated servers with Core2 Quads or Intel Xeons are available from $159 per month.

Of course, the table shown above is not meant to be as a definitive authority on choosing a dedicated servers, but as a quick-starter; and each technology architect should look closely on how different configurations might impact performance and costs.

I hope you liked this article. If you did, you might also be interested in:

•  Guide: How to Switch Web Hosting Providers
• How to Secure your Web Server
• Step-by-step guide on Diagnosing & Resolving web server problems
• Monitoring and Automatic Recovery of server services
• 3 Tools to Monitor Your Website’s status