No. The tweaks we describe on this website will deliver comparable results on a premium cloud server and a $100/month dedicated server. You can not make WordPress faster beyond a certain point. There is a software stack limitation.
If your budget is $100/month for hosting one WordPress website then a cloud server is a better option unless you need TBs of disc space. There are several reasons behind this phenomenon. The reason we tell you vendor-specific guides (such as, Configure Nginx as a Reverse Proxy for Apache on HP Cloud) because there can be the difference between vendors because of the underlying hardware, optimization, type of virtualization, number of clients etc.
Dedicated servers are superior for WordPress sites in certain use cases. But again, unmanaged dedicated servers and OpenVZ containers are enough risky and it is better to have another live backup server ready. Managed dedicated servers from Media Template,
Why and When Dedicated Servers are Superior for WordPress Sites
Dedicated servers deliver consistent performance. MySQL, Apache2, and Memcached all perform equally well unless there is a huge load on the server. When your WordPress site has more than 30K per month hits and has complicated themes and plugins sucking a huge amount of processing power then a dedicated server will not break the SLA of maintaining a decent load average.
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When the number of visitors per day is more than 20-30K, then a dedicated server becomes the usual choice. An optimized dedicated server of course positively changes the TTFB. Not sharing bandwidth and compute resources results in a higher levels of server uptime, improved latency and increased application resiliency.
If you have one SSD and one spinning hard disk drive, then you can set the space of /var/www/html, /usr/share/backup according to your choice. Of course, the amount of disk space is huge.
Probably search engine bots will smoothly crawl the server. Even the cheapest dedicated will offer some advantages.
Why Dedicated Servers are Not Superior to Cloud Servers?
Because our budget is too low! At $100 per month budget, you’ll get an old, overused dedicated server with an old, slower network card and smaller SSDs. On the other hand, the setup of virtualization will demand newer servers with faster RAM. In most cases, we can not afford a dedicated server of more than a 16GB or 32GB RAM configuration. Most of them have DDR3 RAM and have been running for over a decade! Most importantly, the LAMP stack has limitations. We can not optimize WordPress beyond a certain level.
Final Words
If your WordPress site requires more than 10GB RAM, then a dedicated server is an option since the cost of any premium cloud server is not dirt cheap, and the offered disc space is often not impressive. A cloud server is cost-effective when they are of low RAM and low spec. The running cost of a 16GB cloud server and a 16GB dedicated server are almost comparable! However, a cloud server will offer a faster networking card.
So, a cloud server is the winner or under $80-$100 per month budget. But, even though a dedicated server will not significantly improve the performance, it will offer you round-the-clock consistent performance. Also, know that any virtualized instance (=cloud server) may get deleted. Taking backup on a dedicated server with two hard disks is very easy.
