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Dedicated Server vs Cloud Debate, Advice and Best Practices
This is a topic that could possibly span a whole book to cover correctly and is something many of our customers ask us about on a frequent basis. To properly and honestly answer this question we ask the a series of questions in response so we can advise whether a Cloud VPS Server makes sense over a Dedicated Server.
What are your goals for this project?
How much bandwidth, IO and CPU does your application use?
Do you plan to host it on a single Cloud VPS or Dedicated Server?
What is your budget?
The above is the simplified version of how we approach the situation, we cannot simply give a blanket answer to a situation we do not fully know. It would be a disservice to the client to be advised to go Dedicated or Cloud VPS without properly understanding their needs.
“Our Cloud VPS”
All clouds are not equal in value, performance or reliability. In our Cloud we have a 1 to 1 redundancy on all nodes and we do not rely on shared storage. Based on 9 years of production and 0 dataloss and downtime for our customers we believe this is the way. We have acquired many customers from other providers who faced dataloss and massive downtime due to central storage failures or hacking.
We also admit that we’re the only provider we know who uses the 1 to 1 redundancy, where two physical servers make up the node with independent, live mirrored storage. We also don’t have any IO bottlenecks because we do not use shared storage, all storage is local, while at the same time being live mirrored to the stand-by server in a way that it does not degrade production performance.
“Other Cloud VPS”
Most other providers use some sort of shared storage, or in other words have a central point of failure. Besides being more prone to failure due to hardware faults and even hacking, centralized storage on the average tends to be much slower. VPS by nature is already shared, traditionally by servers on the same node, and many will note even on local shared storage, performance can be degraded based on the other containers sharing the node. Imagine the same thing, only with several nodes sharing the same storage. Even if we assume the IO of the storage array is sufficient (which often is not the case), another common bottleneck often rears its head at the network level (with the network link between the node and storage becoming saturated).
Dedicated Server, Private, Dedicated Cloud/Clustered Hybrid
The great thing about a Dedicated Server is that you get all of the resources to yourself, for 100% exclusive use, it is why they are still popular today. There is no risk that another user can crash your server or slow you down when you are not sharing any of the hardware whatsoever.
If you must go with a single dedicated, we always recommend RAID 1 or RAID 10, for performance and reliability.
However we recommend you get at least 2 identical servers and have us configure your own Dedicated, Private Cloud service. This way you get the best of both worlds, the benefits of dedicated and the benefits our our redundant Cloud technology.
The Difference Between A Dedicated Server and Cloud Server
Some of the industry marketing is so misleading that we find ourselves explaining to customers that a Cloud Server is still on shared infrastructure, and Dedicated is a physical server allocated so you can use 100% of the resources without sharing anything.
When it comes to the cost between Cloud and Physical, there reaches a plateau with Cloud that it becomes more expensive as you increase your RAM and HDD space. At that point it makes financial sense, aside from the great benefits of 100% resource allocation, to switch to a Dedicated Server. However, we always advise to get at least 2 servers and create your own Private Cloud VPS on them.
Conclusion
We hope this explains some of the pros and cons, we recommend forgetting the Cloud if the storage is shared and if your budget allows, make your own Private, Dedicated Cloud.