Is a Dedicated Server a Worthwhile Investment?
-
Greeting MOZ Community:
Our site is hosted on a virtual private server. Apparently there are dozens of other web sites hosted on the same server. The performance is usually pretty fast, with the site downloading in 1-3 seconds. However, a few times per month, the performance slows down, to say 5-6 seconds. Please see the attached image.
I suspect this may have something to do with the other web sites on the server.
Currently we pay about $60/month. A dedicated server would cost about $120/month. Would site performance be more consistent on a dedicated server? Could we enjoy potential SEO benefits by having our own server, i.e. could we rank slightly higher if the speed was more consistent and the performance slightly faster?
Thanks, Alan
-
I don't think that can be had for the price. I pay around $260 for a single xeon with a ssd and 8 gig.
-
The answer will depend to a degree on the load that your traffic places on the server and the quality of the equipment in your server.
If you get one with a nice amount of memory, fast processor and solid state harddrive then the speed increase could be so pronounced that you will be able to tell when it goes into service without being told... at the same time that could be overkill if your traffic is modest.
Getting efficient images and caching working could have a greater impact on speed than the equipment.
If you do both then you will have the best situation.
-
You cut-off load sample size on your screenshot. If the sample size is low, the data is not that accurate and more measurement may be needed.
You are right though, one of the key factors in migration to a dedicated server is your page load times.
-
If you can give a bit more info about the site that would help.
Cost Benefit and load time can be subjective depending on the industry and also what load time is for the normal user and how much "Load Time" is the next issue to tackle on your SEO list of things to do. You might get far more gains in authority by focusing on core weaknesses such as content, social, and link building that you will gain from the cost spend on a dedicated server
Hope that that is useful.
Bruce
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Migrating to new Windows Server
Hello, We are migrating an existing website to a new Windows 2016 Server. Please advise or direct us to any good resources for advice on important configurations for the server primarily with respect to SEO. For example, is it important to ensure Pinging is enabled on server? Or are there good IIS add ons / features we should ensure we use, like URL rewrite? Thank you in advance for your response!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | srbello0 -
Mixing static.htm urls and dynamic urls on a Windows IIS Server?
Hi all, We've had a website originally built using static html with .htm extensions ranking well in Google hence we want to keep those pages/urls. We are on a dedicated sever (Windows IIS). However our developer has custom made a new DYNAMIC section for the site which shows new added products dynamically and allows them to be booked online via shopping cart. We are having problems displaying them both on the same domain even if we put the dynamic section withing its own subfolder and keep the static htms in the root. Is it possible to have both function on IIS (even if they may have to function a little separately)? Does anyone have previous experience of this kind of issue or a way of making both work? What setup do we need to do on the dedicated server.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Should I let Google crawl my production server if the site is still under development?
I am building out a brand new site. It's built on Wordpress so I've been tinkering with the themes and plug-ins on the production server. To my surprise, less than a week after installing Wordpress, I have pages in the index. I've seen advice in this forum about blocking search bots from dev servers to prevent duplicate content, but this is my production server so it seems like a bad idea. Any advice on the best way to proceed? Block or no block? Or something else? (I know how to block, so I'm not looking for instructions). We're around 3 months from officially launching (possibly less). We'll start to have real content on the site some time in June, even though we aren't planning to launch. We should have a development environment ready in the next couple of weeks. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoItHappy0 -
Are Bluehost servers slow or is it just me?
I have a ton of websites on Bluehosts servers... are my sites slow because I have so many sites on there? Or is Bluehost slow for everyone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
DNS(Name servers), IP and domain.. All Showing Same Site...
Hello, My site is hosted on VPS with dedicate IP. The problem I am facing is my site is indexed and cached by domain, IP address and name server. I am able to open all the pages via www.xyz.com and and IP 1.1.1.1 and the name sever like ns1. hosted.com And if I USE site operator in google for 1.1.1.1 and ns1.hosted.com there are so many pages which is cache and in sites. Is it any server issue my hosting company give me a reply as given below "This is because that site is on the same ip as the nameserver. This is completely correct and normal. This is not an error." Is it true ? can you help me in this issue? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semshah1430 -
How to handle a server outage if I have two sites
I operate a web application. It consists of two sites, www.mysite.com and app.mysite.com. As you might imagine, www is used for marketing purposes, and it's our main organic search entry point. The app.mysite.com domain is where our application portal is for customers, and it is also where our login and registration pages are located. Currently, www.mysite.com is experiencing a catastrophic outage and is returning 504 errors, but app.mysite.com is on a totally separate system with a lot redundancy, and is doing just fine. If we get traffic from referrals or search, we want that traffic to be able to login and register, so we've replaced the 504 error with a 302 redirect to app.mysite.com until the situation is resolved. This provides the best possible experience for users (nothing's worse than a 504). How will this affect SEO? Is there something other than a 302 that I should be doing with the broken www.mysite.com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ehren0 -
Planning for Website traffic on a self-hosted web server
How would you plan for the levels of traffic on an in-house web server? The scenario is that website is basically running on a T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection pipe, and traffic projects to increase significantly with content growing from about 40 uniques a day (on less than 20 poorly optimized web pages + associated PDF documents), to over 150 search optimized content pages + offsite traffic and link building. I'm trying to figure out what kinds of avg traffic levels (plus spikes) would represent a maximum bandwidth capacity for this...given that its a narrow specialty B2B focus. Any answers would be useful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GLogic0 -
Should I Host New Blog On Different Server?
I am planning on starting a new blog focused on a very specific subject that is related to my current Lead Generation website. I am doing this because I want to build rankings for this site and have it link back to my Lead Generation website to increase its rankings (this is the main purpose). My question is do I need to host it on another server so Google will not see it as having the same IP or Subnet? Note: I already have one blog linked to my Lead Generation website under the same domain. This new blog would be linked to an entirely different domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0