Tag Archives: Dedicated Server

Can You Setup A Web Hosting Server In Your Home or Office?

Many of our friends who feel that they have outgrown shared hosting or a VPS service, often ask us whether they can setup a Dedicated Hosting Server in their own Home or Office to cut costs. Of course it is possible and has been done before by many companies, however, it may not always be a prudent option for a small or medium business and sometimes not a good idea for a large business too. This article explains what it entails to host your website or web apps from your own office or home.

Can You Setup A Web Hosting Server In Your Home or Office?

Server Room

While this may sound unnecessary, if you really want to do things professionally, you should have a dedicated server room which houses the server on which you are going to host your website or resources. This server room needs to have 24 x 7 facilities as given below. Many server hardware providers will not provide you with a warranty or may void the warranty if you do not have a dedicated server room with these facilities. The server room can be locked to ensure cleanliness and also for physical security of the infrastructure. Server Rooms need to have special ducting and cabling to accommodate all the physical connections to it. Servers are usually mounted in Server Racks, which house the Network Switches, Cables and peripherals.

Air Conditioning

Every server room or server should have the adequate temperature controlled environment, to ensure stability and smooth running. An HVAC system is required to ensure that the temperature and ventilation is balanced and that extreme external climates don’t affect the server hardware. The HVAC system needs to be run 24×7 and should ideally be fully automated.

Power Backup

Usually live servers have a UPS and Battery backup to ensure that in the event of a grid failure or power line fault, automatically the UPS kicks in and keeps the server afloat. Diesel powered generators are also commonly used to ensure prolonged sustenance of power supply to the facility.

Security and fire-fighting mechanisms

Physical security of the server is most important. Proper security and surveillance needs to be setup to ensure a safe environment for the server and its data. Intrusion detection systems, alarm systems and even CCTV camera’s maybe installed to provide all round protection. Server rooms need special fire fighting equipment with clean fire fighting agents to ensure that in the event of a fire, the fire extinguishers cause less damage than the actual fire. The clean foam leaves no residue and ensures that the affected area can be cleaned off the foam. These foams are very expensive and an entire commercial fire safety system can cost much more as compared to household ones.

Technicians

An important aspect of having a server which is live on the internet, is having a dedicated support team to troubleshoot it and to take corrective action in case of a fault. This means that you would need to employ minimum 2 people who have the relevant expertise, to work in 2 shifts round the clock. The technicians need to be well equipped with various testing and monitoring tools to enable them to keep the server up and running.

Spares

A wide array of spares need to be maintained at the site of the server, to ensure quick replacement of faulty hardware and also to ensure that the spares are available. Most server rooms have a standard of maintaining atleast one additional redundant piece of hardware, for every set of hardware put into or used for the server. This applies to cables and cabling equipment as well. Server rooms keep miles of spare cable at hand, to ensure emergency patching and quick replacement of faulty cables. Since cables are relatively inexpensive, they are completely discarded upon failure and are completely replaced.

You don’t need to mandatorily have these facilities when setting up a server, but not having these facilities will definitely hamper the smooth running of the hosting server in the long term. If you are serious about hosting your own website, you should do it professionally.

Why you should think thrice before taking a Dedicated Server

We are all prone to wanting more in almost everything life offers. This is also common to buying website hosting - we want more. More hosting space, more processing power, more RAM and more bandwidth as well. We want a bigger, meaner machine which has all the bells and whistles that your money can buy. But we rarely stop to think, whether we really need it and whether that is really the solution to everything. This article tries to reason why you should rethink your purchase of a Dedicated Server for your website or web application.

Why you should think thrice before taking a Dedicated Server

Misled by Developers

The most common cause of goofing up a dedicated server decision is due to being misled by your software developers or designers. Many a time, they have no clue how much of the resources they will really need and want to save themselves the trouble of migrating your data at a later stage, hence they coax you into believing that you need a monster configuration server which will magically solve all your problems. The less experienced the developer is, the less empirical or statistical evidence he will show you, for justifying the purchase. 3 years back, we received an email from a friend, asking us for a very high configuration machine. When we realized he was being guided by his developer, we suggested that they do a trial run on a small 5 GB shared hosting account. Till date, they have not needed more than that and are very happy we saved them the huge expenditure.

Warped Estimates

Before we suggest a Dedicated Server, we request the client to send us an estimate of his requirements and how he has come to that conclusion. Most of the time, the client has made wrong calculations and drastically changed the entire estimation by using predicted figures, which may not actually work in a production environment. This may mean that he has either under-estimated the requirement and will need to upgrade the server in the short term or he has overestimated the requirements and goes for an overkill solution. There are numerous benchmarking tools, which can help predict the exact amount of resources that the website or application requires and also helps test the limit of those resources.

Over-ambition

In the past few years we have often heard from atleast 10 different clients, that their future plan is to make an “online portal like Facebook”. While that may seem like a very progressive thought, it is often accompanied by a lack of planning and exaggeration. Ofcourse everyone wants to be the best, but they want to do it overnight, without looking into the path travelled by the industry giants. This over ambition eclipses their decision of doing some realtime tests and then jumping into the project in full swing. We often see that those who take a dedicated server, drop the idea by the 5th or 6th month, when they realize that their requirement was miniscule or their goal is not achievable at the time.

Laziness to troubleshoot

Another common reason why people want to go in for a Dedicated Server is because they don’t want to get down to the root of the issue of high resource usage, but instead would like to work around the issue by pumping in more hardware resources. A blaring example would be that of a small time ecommerce portal, which was so badly coded that the SQL queries kept getting throttled due to being slow, clumsily written and buggy. Rather than modifying the query to its optimum best, the webmaster chose to add more CPU resources by upgrading the server. This solved the problem for a few weeks, till the query started taking more time. Thereafter he went in for a better configuration server. This time, in a few weeks the same problem cropped up and he realised that the problem lay in his SQL coding and not in the server. He has now happily switched to shared hosting and has got the SQL beautifully optimized. His laziness definitely cost him time and money, but it also made him wiser for the long-term.

When Should I Shift From Shared Hosting To A VPS?

When Should I Shift From Shared Hosting To A VPS?

With storage and data processing moving online, web hosting is becoming more advanced by the day. but the overwhelming set of options leaves the end user spoilt for choice and also confused at the variety of options. A frequently asked question that we often hear is when should a customer shift from Shared Hosting to a VIrtual Private Server or VPS.

Root Access

A major concern for people on shared hosting is that they want to have all the control. They want to know what’s going on with the box that is hosting their website, what is the system status, what version of each software there is, what software should be there, who has access to the box, what hardware should be attached to it and so on. Some software or web applications genuinely require you to have root access to install certain add-ons or to configure some server-wide settings. These settings are such that they would not be permitted on a Shared Host due to its adverse impact on other websites sharing the same server and being affected by the configuration change. Shared Hosts need to keep a check and balance of all the software that will affect their system’s, because they are answerable to all their customers.

Isolation and Testing

Another important reason for switching to a VPS is to have your entire application, file system and maybe even network isolated from others. This maybe due to the sensitive nature of the application or the information stored on the server or may simply be to conduct some tests or experiments. Penetration testing on websites is done by creating a VPS with a mirrored version of the website, so that the actual website is not affected. Even firewalls and protection systems need to be tested in isolation. Testing the Operating System Kernel or making a change in the core files of an OS can be quite risky. No host will allow you to play around with their live servers.

Customized Requirements

When the software developer needs a specific set of requirements, like a specific Operating System or a specific Database Management System, then the conventional shared hosting may just not be the right option. Many a time the right combinations are also not available for developers. A specific database (DBMS) variant may not be available with any hosting company because it isn’t popular. Similarly no host will support a customized Linux version. This means that you will have to install and manage it yourself. If you don’t need to control the hardware of the box, then it makes no sense going in for a Dedicated Server - a VPS would be the ideal choice.

Selling a Service

If you are selling a hosted service, like a web application or an online software or an ecommerce platform, it’s best for you to take a VPS, if not a Dedicated Server itself. The VPS helps you to have full control and flexibility in managing the system and monitoring all aspects of your IT infrastructure. Those selling a “Software as a Service” are sure to need either a VPS or a Dedicated Server. Infact they should not use Shared Hosting which can be affected by various external factors as well as by other users on the same system. VPS systems can be easily migrated to a Dedicated Server and can be put into a production environment easily.

The decisive factor in choosing a VPS over a Dedicated Server is usually the price. A VPS is not a physical machine and hence shares the physical resources with other VPS systems. Whereas a Dedicated Server gives you ultimate control of even the hardware that is running your systems.