I don’t want to see anyone get stuck with services that are too expensive or not robust enough to handle their needs. Oftentimes on this site I refer to scalability, which does not mean the capacity to handle large loads. Scalability means the ability to increase capacity to keep up with the load and site traffic.
Here I’ll describe the process of growing your website as your needs require. We start with the Easy Bake recipe, using a web hosting service to handle DNS, the website, and our email. For email broadcasts, we’ll use Mail Merge.
Then let’s say we find that using mail merge is cumbersome because it requires us to manually add each new subscriber to the Excel email list spreadsheet. It also takes hours and hours to run the email broadcast and, frankly, we need our computer back. So the first step to growing is to start running a web-based email broadcaster like phplist.
This worked good for a while, but now with 10,000 names it takes a whole day for the broadcast to run, we need a faster solution. At this point we can outsource the mailing to a company that will charge about 0.02ยข per email – but that’s $200 for one mailing! So it’s time to find a new webhost who will allow a burst of email bandwidth. Get ready to pay for this, but remember it’s cheaper than outsourcing.
Once we’ve found a good one, we’ll go to our DNS registrar and point the “A” record to the IP address of our new webhost. Leave the mail, or “MX” record alone – we’ll continue to use the old service to handle the individual email accounts – it’s cheap, it still works, it saves a headache, and it ensures there won’t be an interruption to service.
Dedicated Hosting
Here’s a potential problem: Your website is a huge success, you have tens of thousands of supporters on your email list, and now things are starting to run slow. But … but … you’re supposed to be getting a terabyte of transfer per month and you’re not even approaching the limit. What gives?
Here’s the scam: Your hosting provider may get, for example, 50 TB of data transfer per month, and they’ll typically exceed 100 clients per machine. So the bandwidth has been over-promised. Not everyone can hit their capacity, but normally most don’t even come close. Just to make sure things don’t get out of hand, they will throttle your per-second usage to something like 3megabits, and that amounts to apx. 900 GigaBytes per month, if you’re running at full capacity for 24 hours a day. But generally your site is only that busy for 16 hours a day, resulting in 600 GB at the end of the month. What a gyp!
As a rule, you will pay more and get less throughput per month with a dedicated server, but you also won’t get capped at a measly 3mbps either.
For example, one terabyte of throughput at a 1&1 shared website is $5 per month. A Dedicated host with the same throughput costs $110 per month.
Dedicated Hosting, or a Dedicated Server, what’s the Difference?
Dedicated hosting is when you are the only client on the machine. It’s just like the setup you had on a shared host, except it’s yours, and no one else shares that IP address. It’s fully outfitted with web based control panels, and is managed by your hosting provider who may even do regular backups.
If you have to go the dedicated route, this is the first option.
Dedicated servers are when you build your own server from the ground up, or a provider supplies you with root access to a freshly installed system. While essentially the same as before, this is what’s become known as having a co-located server. No one but you has access to it.
So you’ve decided to get a dedicated server
Are you sure you really need to do this? How big is your campaign? Are there any alternatives, such as splitting off your multimedia files to a subdomain? No. You’re certain this needs to be done.
Let me repeat, are you sure you really need to do this? You WILL need a system administrator to babysit it. You HAVE to read the log files, perform regular system upgrades (hoping they don’t break your site) and possibly handcraft the firewall.
It takes me about 2 weeks to build up a production-ready server, or a day if I’m doing it a second time and following a prewritten script. That’s a lot of work, and I don’t come cheap. So an attractive option is a prebuilt dedicated hosted server.