As a business, it is essential to continuously monitor, not just the cost of your hosting compared with services offered by other companies, but also the quality. Many businesses tend to rent dedicated servers, but buying your own web server and collocating it, could be a viable option as well.

Whilst renting a dedicated a server can keep overheads low initially, it does restrict the expansion of a business in the long term. Most people or businesses renting dedicated servers constantly need to upgrade memory to ensure their server can keep up with their requirements. Whilst memory is extremely cheap these days and is readily available, most dedicated server providers will increase the cost of the server on a monthly basis. Every time you need to upgrade the memory on your server in the future will also be subject to an additional monthly charge, which can increase costs considerably.

Of course, once you are able to move away from a rented server, the high monthly costs will disappear. What used to be huge over heads are reduced to an initial fixed cost which pays for the servers. All that’s left to pay for then is the rack space and bandwidth, so you can soon see why if your requirements are fairly large, then buying your own server and collocating it, is probably the most sensible route to take.

So when looking at the big picture we can see that the obvious option, when your web hosting requirements are fairly minimal, would be to go down the rental route. As the business becomes more established and memory requirements increase, so will the monthly costs of the rented dedicated server. This is obviously where the possibility of buying your own server becomes a financially viable option; but it is essential that you do the correct research to ensure that your own server will be tailor made to your needs.

You’re not convinced? Costing is an issue that holds a great deal of variance. Different people build and buy different dedicated servers and their current rental servers may vary in price on a monthly basis, so it is hard to identify potential savings. In general an extremely powerful server will cost in the region of $3,000 to build from scratch; the specification of this will be far superior in comparison to a rented dedicated server. Of course this is a huge outlay upfront, but by saving just $250 per month, which is quite easily done, buying a dedicated server has been an extremely worthwhile investment.

So why wouldn’t you buy a web server?

A lot of server owners will tell you that the financial benefits of buying your own server are extremely rewarding. What they may also tell you is the fact that buying your own web server, also means maintaining it. Whilst this may seem like a small task, the benefits of having an ISP fix your dedicated server soon become apparent, when your own server fails. It’s worth taking into account your technical skills or at least the technical skills of your team before choosing this option.

What are your thoughts on this?

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