Thrudigital

I’d like to share my experiences about dedicated server space bought from GoDaddy. Actually, it’s not 100% bought since I pay every month, so in fact, I’m just leasing it. Even though this may read like an advertisment, please rest assured that there is no relationship between me and GoDaddy from which I stand to profit.

My website (aqua-fish.net) is hosted on an unmanaged Linux-powered dedicated server, since I know a little about servers and GoDaddy offers you a range of control panels to choose from. A few months ago, after a series of network outages, I decided it was time to change my hosting provider. You might think that 10-60 minutes timeout every 2-3 weeks isn’t too worrying, but if your site receives 3-10,000 requests each hour, it’s a huge downtime. That’s at least 3000 unsatisfied requests from visitors and bots, but also from search engines. How can your website rank well with so many failed attempts?

Another point of view is accessibility. I don’t want to slander other webhosting companies (so they’re not mentioned here, but they’re at the bottom), but plenty of “dedicated server” hosting packages come with unbelievably low prices. What’s behind these low prices? A friend of mine who owns sport-cars.org tried at least four US-based companies and only one offered a normal connection speed. Many companies sell you servers cheaply, but their connection is like a dial-up from a garage! Here are two snapshots showing connection speed between Google and my primary website. The second snapshot shows the connection between sport-cars.org and Google too.

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As you can see, the previous hosting deal was limiting number of pages crawled per day, but the number of kilobytes downloaded per day (images and video files especially) and the time spent downloading a page are both now much more acceptable. Please bear in mind that the core files contain more than 30000 lines of code, hence it’s not lower than 423 milliseconds. Subdomains show better connectivity. All in all, the situation is much better now than it was before. Dedicated hosting brought not only stability (there is no network downtime now), but also speed.

Now, let’s look at the stats for sport-cars.org:

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In the end of August the site was moved from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server. Also the geographical location was changed from Slovakia to the USA. It is amazing how accessibility could get so much worse! More than 1500 milliseconds from 700 milliseconds previously. In addition, the original server was shared, not dedicated. In addition, aqua-fish.net was on the same server before, in Slovakia. After discovering the connection problem, my friend moved the site back to Slovakia. Later he found another company in the US, and tried again. The only good connection he found was in Slovakia. So… how can a website which is based in Slovakia be more accessible than the same website hosted in the USA? The answer is simple; it’s about hosting. You won’t get a good connection with every dedicated server.

The solution isn’t always buying a cheap dedicated server. There’s usually a reason why some dedicated servers are cheap; there’s often something lacking in their service: it could be connection speeds, downtime, and so on.

Of course, GoDaddy isn’t the most expensive hosting company and I pay only £90/month (including taxes). You can find rackspace offering managed dedicated servers for about £400/month or more. Yes, a managed server might cost more, but let’s take a look at why I chose an unmanaged package over a managed one.

If you pay for between 1 and 6 months in advance, your server’s configuration (software) should be up to date. After 6 months you can buy another new server and give up the old one. It isn’t that difficult. Of course, if you know how to install new packages, how to stop, start and restart services, and how to kill processes, then you can continue with an unmanaged server. On GoDaddy you can use their assistance services too, and it’s even possible to pay for these services for a limited time period. So, for instance you only need initial set-up and some basic configuration. So, you can order the shortest assistance plan available, and get exactly what you need. I needed some help from GoDaddy due to the external firewall which I pay for and they helped me with everything, giving clear instructions about what to do. The only thing I had to do was to run all commands myself.

With an unmanaged dedicated server you take all responsibility for every action. With managed one you’re not 100% responsible. But in my opinion it isn’t worth it paying a few hundreds of dollars for something you can do yourself.

So, my conclusion is this: don’t be amazed by cheap deals. Instead, try to find a really reliable company. I’m not saying that any company that offers dedicated server space for £30/month must be crap, but usually you get what you pay for: so, if you pay a reasonable amount, you get a decent package.

The friend mentioned earlier about used olm.net with very poor response time, and galaxyvisions.com failed to refund the money.