It can be confusing to some of the readers as sometimes we say that dedicated servers are a great choice for hosting WordPress, and other times we are praise cloud servers. Is sponsorship money playing behind these contradictory statements or there are practical problems?
Managed dedicated servers are great for performance. Unless you pay a huge behind-the-premium cloud server you never get the full throttle. But the bill of managed dedicated servers is huge and managing disasters by a single webmaster is next to impossible in certain situations.
Why Choose a Cloud Server Over a Dedicated Server?
Cost Factor
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The average cost of OpenVZ/Virtuozzo-based instances is $1-$2 per GB of RAM. KVM and Zen virtualization costs around $5 per GB of RAM. Whereas a dedicated server will cost you around $10 per GB RAM, that’s too, you can not choose below 8GB or 12GB ram servers.
In the case cloud server, you can reduce the total bill by opting for an unmanaged service. Indeed, most of the cloud servers are offered as unmanaged servers. For a dedicated server, you will need a managed layer and probably a paid web hosting panel. Additionally, some web hosts will charge $50 as setup fees.
Easy Infrastructure Management
You can use a cloud server without a web hosting panel because the web host’s control panel already have buttons to restart, start, stop and reinstall OS. In rare situations, you’ll need to open a support ticket.
But in the case of a dedicated server, if SSH login fails, your luck going to be bad. Yes, there are other ways to connect including KVM but it is SSH which is often quick to manage a server from any device. If the web host’s support is slower, you’ll not get any way to take the content out from your server. Worser the web host, the worse will be your luck. After facing an out-of-memory (OOM) situation, the support can not easily upgrade the RAM even if the motherboard supports hot swap.
Cloud server is never fully unmanaged
There are always sysadmins working behind the cloud server instances watching the network. Indirectly this factor increases security. It is not easy to hack inside the network of Linode, AWS etc. If there is something suspicious, the sysadmins will shut down the instance and ping you to investigate. Thus, the responsibilities become shared in case of cloud.
Cloud server offers you the best possible network speed
Normally you’ll get a 1Gbps to 32Gbps shared connection for your cloud server instance. In the case of a dedicated server, the cheapest can be offered mere 100Mbps connection.
Uptime
Usually, in long run, the clusters of cloud servers have a higher uptime when compared to a dedicated server. Although it matters too less, it requires mentioning.
Conclusion
A high-end dedicated server from a reputed web host along with your skilled sysadmins can deliver the best experience for website visitors. But, cloud servers are unbeatable in cost and flexibility for a single webmaster handling all the things.
