Dedicated Hosting or Grid Server: What Should I Choose?
I’ve had a lot of friends lately asking me for hosting advice since I happen to work at Layered Tech. Since everyone’s situation is different, I’ve kind of standardized on an approach to explaining the hosting situation…
Since the dawn of the World Wide Web, Webmasters have sought out the fastest hosting options with the greatest bang for the buck. We often start with shared sites that can accommodate many infrequently visited domains (like a $5 per month hosting account), but after achieving popularity on at least one, a Webmaster’s attention usually turns to a dedicated server to avoid the pain of service interruptions.
The logic is simple. If having a shared hosting plan (or a VPS) is good, getting the entire server is better! The only question that remains: is it the best available option? Well, companies like Layered Tech have taken the dedicated server one step further by combining the resources of many physical machines into one large computing Grid. So, if one server is good, surely 100 is better!
The obvious advantage of migrating to a dedicated server is that the machine has far more “spare” resources than an overworked shared server (where you are probably sharing one computer with over 1,000 other people). The less obvious problem is that even a dedicated server will eventually become saturated, necessitating yet another migration to yet a larger physical machine.
Grid based servers avoid this problem by allowing Webmasters to increase the physical resources on demand. This allows the provisioning of a small “virtual machine” initially in order to keep costs low, yet maintains the flexibility of upgrading the power as simply as flipping a switch. No physical migrations to a new platform necessary!
Layered Tech’s focus on selling massive Grids to enterprise clients has not prevented them from also offering individual Virtual Machines to Webmasters of all sizes. Prices start at $49/mo. so there is really no reason to ever get stuck on an underpowered machine again.
So, if you’ve grown beyond simple shared hosting, and you need some help with a larger hosting account, feel free to drop me a note or a comment and I’ll be happy to help you out. I’ve already done so with a lot of my friends, and I don’t mind a bit.
One email per post. Twenty years of this, still going. Unsubscribe whenever.
We have found the Grid Layer hosting program from Layered tech to be very unreliable. Lots of crashes and down time.
When I moved my blog over to a grid server recently with GoDaddy, they explained it to me by telling me that my site would be on 8 different servers at once. If there was a demand for services from websites that are on the shared plan, the resources could come from any one of the 8 servers, so as to not load a single server… does this sound right?
John
No John, unfortunatly I don’t believe that at all. Grid hosting provides one main benefit – redundancy. This should not be confused with scalability.
Redundance is what you need when one physical server has an outage. It enables your content to be served from another physical server while the original is being repaired. This way your site stays online.
Scalability is what you need when you have a sudden increase in demand. It requires complex load balancing in order to distributed requests to multiple machines in order to share the load among many servers.
Grid computing systems could theoretically do this, though it would come at a much higher price tag, because the host would not be able to over-subscribe the machines in the same way. Your best bet is just to buy a larger server and make sure that you are using caching plugins such as WP Super Cache, etc.
Cheers,
John P.
I am also having problem regarding hosting my site. I hosted my site on shared godaddy account. As it grows naturally, having hard time to load website. Please let us know what is good solution for better price. :)
For $50, MT hosting is cool especially if you want to resell some hosting space to your clients. But interesting thing is most of the cloud are some kind of special VPS solution (Not saying about Google App Engine and Amazon EC2). So my preference goes like this if I want hosting
1) Cloud VPS (MT, Slicehost)
2) VPS (RapidVPS)
3) Dedicated Server (I don’t use it anymore)
Amit, I understand what you are saying, but I think the idea behind a grid server is you pay for what you use. That is, a grid server can grow with you from infancy (when a dedicated server is unnecessary) to magnitude (when a dedicated server might not be enough). But maybe I am missing something.
Hi, i would recommend you to go for dedicated servers because i have rented 3 servers from different companies and they are the best, we need to signup with server support companies for best services and highest uptime.
Thanks for the insight John, I was actually discussing the hosting options with a friend yesterday for an upcoming project and will certainly drop you a line when it’s time to move on it.
Jeremy
The hosting issue is one that constantly pops up. Is the idea of a computing grid is similar to the setups search engines use?
I have considered grid hosting with other companies but decided against it for two reasons: Limited Resources and Costs.
Limited Resources. Grid hosting companies often use their own technology, which can be limiting for some users. That is, are there any types of people who would not benefit from a grid server plan due to grid server limitations? For example, would a grid server plan work well for (1) people who need a lot of MySQL databases, (2) people who need very large MySQL databases, (3) people with thousands of infrequently visited domains, etc.? I ask because I had trouble finding a host that could meet all my needs, so I have hosting accounts with two companies.
Costs. Does a person pay more for grid hosting? That is, it seemed like grid hosting was more expensive in a side-by-side comparison with traditional hosting companies when I looked at them. (Media Temple was the company I considered.)
I could be wrong on these. Thanks for considering these questions.