Managed Dedicated Server Overview

Are you looking for hosting? You may be asking yourself what is the best solution for your website or online application. One that will provide the uptime and reliability you need with the best support in the industry?  Let's go through a breakdown of our traditional Dedicated Server options to get a full scope on the aspects of these types of servers.

A traditional Dedicated Server means pure hardware. It's customized and built to the specifications you select on our website. All resources (CPU, RAM, Disk) are “dedicated” to only you and no other customer.

What does it mean to be Fully Managed customer?

Tired of struggling with server configuration and maintenance? That is where our Fully Managed Support applies to you. Full Management is going to offer a variety of support options for your server. Those options are below:

1. Fully Managed (CentOS - WHM/cPanel and/or Windows - Plesk)
2. Heroic Support Accessible 24/7/365
3. Fully Managed Network Infrastructure
4. Fully Managed Hardware
5. Server housed in our completely owned Liquid Web Data Centers
6. Level 3 Technicians On-Site 24/7/365
7. System Level Monitoring Alerts & Notifications
8. System Level Health Monitoring and Graphing
9. 100% Uptime SLA on These Items
10. Installation and Full Support of Core Software Package
11. Core Operating System Updates & Patches
12. Security Enhancements
13. Virus and Spam Protection
14. Full Control Panel Support
15. Control Panel Updates and Patches
    To see a full support comparison, see the Support Comparison Chart.

Experiencing performance issues? Large growth? These are early signs that you may need a Dedicated Server to handle processes? Let's talk on the key components that call for a Dedicated Server.

Performance Issues
Have an e-commerce site and experiencing slow load times when your site is active? Consider upgrading to a Dedicated Server to really kick your website into high gear. An influx of traffic coming to your site demands more from server's resources.

Each time a user submits an order via your e-commerce site, a read/write request to the MySQL database is performed. Multiply this process by 1,500+ users performing the same action causing your hard disk read/write to spike. For regular VPS servers, this spike may leave your VPS struggling to serve visitors. With Dedicates Server using Solid State Drives (SSD) they can serve out faster read/write speeds.

Increased Traffic
Having a popular site is a great problem to have! Traffic spikes can happen due to various reasons. A Dedicated or Cloud Dedicated Server is going to be your first step on ensuring you are ready for increased traffic. If you require scalability, our Cloud VPS products give you the flexibility of resizing and upgrading or downgrading your server with a simple click of a button. We don’t stop there, you may be in a position to explore our Enterprise options to handle high demand traffic!

Server Errors
Pulling up your website only to see a “500 Internal Server Error” can be disastrous for your online business. Most common errors come from a lack of resources to keep your website online and stable. To avoid this type of error, placing yourself on Dedicated hardware is the first step. This goes hand in hand with increased Traffic. A larger flow of traffic can also cause issues due to lack of Dedicated hardware.

Server Specifications
Considering a Dedicated Server can be quite the task if you are not familiar. Let’s break down each server component and talk on how it can benefit you and your application or website.

Server Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Cores
On our Dedicated Servers page, you’ll see that our initial offering is a Single CPU, Quad Core (Intel E3-1230 v5). This means you have a Single CPU Socket on the motherboard with 4 Cores at 3.4Ghz. Each Server CPU will provide a different CPU Clock speed which is important for performance. Higher the clock speed, the more efficient the CPU can process data from your website.

Server Memory (RAM)
LiquidWeb provides you with 16GB DDR4 Memory for Traditional Dedicated Servers. The majority of large websites that are built around a Content Management System use Apache, PHP, and a MySQL Database. Ensuring your server has enough RAM is crucial to maintaining performance as all of these software components will require RAM usage.

For example, a small WordPress site with less than 1,000 visitors per day would be fine to start off with 16GB of RAM. Yet a large e-commerce site with 5,000+ users per day will need extra RAM to handle simultaneous requests.

Hard Disk Drives and Solid State Drives
Configuring a Dedicated Server on our website? You’ll notice that we provide Solid State Drives for your Primary Hard Disk.  We also provide you with a free backup drive of 1TB (SATA 7,200 RPM)! You’ll be placing your Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL onto SSD drives for quicker response times. By utilizing SSD drives, your CPU and RAM will not have to rely on each other due to the high performing speeds on the SSD. If a SATA drive was being utilized to run your LAMP stack, the performance would decrease as there's now a physical moving disk at 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM). When comparing SSD vs SATA, the performance of our SSD is 10x faster than what our SATA drives can deliver. SATA drives are ideal for massive amounts of storage/backups. Files that will not need a lot of access or reading/writing to.

RAID
A Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is an easy method to combine several disks into a big array. There are different levels of RAID. Each that offers their own fault-tolerance, performance, and capacity. There are also different storage techniques such as striping, mirroring, and parity. If your server already has Solid State Drives, adding a RAID array is beneficial to further increase performance and redundancy.

For example, having 2x 250GB SSD drives in RAID1 is a great start. Unless there is a high demand from your users, this can call for a RAID10 array that will add 4x 250GB SSD drives. This will increase storage size and performance for your server, with more drives mirroring and working together on-top of adding redundancy.

Bandwidth
One of the largest benefits of having a Liquid Web Dedicated Server power of 5 Terabytes of bandwidth. This is no added cost and only outgoing bandwidth counts against you! There are two types of bandwidth transfer, incoming and outgoing. When you are uploading files via FTP to your server its considered inbound bandwidth.When a user goes to your website or application, they are sending a request to your server, known as outbound data. We have higher bandwidth packages to offer along with unlimited options if required.

What Kind Of Dedicated Server Is Right For Me?
The big question, how do I know what I need? There are a few recommendations to help yourself get an idea of your needs. If your website is with another hosting provider, contacting that hosting provider and requesting your current servers specifications is recommended. Not all companies will give you the details you need but this could be very helpful in comparing apple to apple services across hosts.
If you are about to start a new online project or want to switch to a Dedicated Server, it's recommended you chat or speak to one of our Hosting Advisors. They can assist you with a fitted package recommendation or answer any technical questions. Check out our Dedicated or Cloud Dedicated solutions to order yours today!