When to switch from hosted web site to dedicated server. Find the right time before switching to dedicated server to avoid financial stress

Every grown up web site sooner or later is on its own server - a dedicated server just for one website. Just as much as every grown up man one day lives in his own home!

The question is when. There are a few other questions to be answered first.

Do you really want to be a professional web publisher and invest years of your life entirely dedicated to professional publishing?

Are you willing to invest ten thousands of hours to create a fully grown up website and offer services and content to all world or are you merely interested in a few quick bucks and easy life?

Is the topic or your site of such value to the world to be worth the effort and sacrifice a fully grown up website on its own dedicated server will require from you?

Let's assume your above replies are favorable and you really have decided to be a professional web publisher, to create your own content and create value for the planet to be offered online and most likely for free.

You may ask yourself when to switch from a regular hosting account that may cost you some 5-15 dollar per month to the dedicated server level. You may also ask or wonder about managed server versus root server. If you are a regular reader of the Cyberspace Ashram or my blog at least, then you know that one of the goals in mankind's life on earth is to learn to live and work within own limits. Hence using a managed server would mean you love the power and benefits of an own server without having acquired the qualification to manage your own server. Hence you would want to have some kind of "paid" slave doing the hard or difficult work for you, leaving only the earning and fun part for you ....

If you want to be professional, then you also have to do the dirty and hard work all on your own. There are many reasons to do so, all are benefits. No one ever gets paid to be online 24/7/365 for a few hundred dollars a months to manage your server. No true and highly qualified / experienced server admin would enjoy to be a slave of others for peanuts and tips only. The security aspect of having a dedicated server requires constant learning, steady updates and upgrades on a daily basis. Reading security alerts and studying your own installed or planned to be installed software. Knowing the software and possible security problems.

All that extra work requires a full dedication to your own work. Hence the word dedicated server. One server dedicated to your work and you - one person - fully dedicated to your server and a worthy cause to have, own and operate a dedicated server.

To have a dedicated server never is a money question. Any grown up web site always brings sufficient advertising revenue to finance the server expenses. The question rather is whether your cause, your topic published is worthy your own sacrifice in time, efforts and money invested. To create a grown up website definitely may require up to ten or more years of full time and fully dedicated work. Fully dedicated work means a work you do with all your heart, body and soul - a work for the wellbeing and benefit of all planet. A work you are willing to give your life. A work you are qualified as a result of many years or better decades to to in a highly professional and motivated way.

Before publishing you need to have the expertise and professional qualifications on the topic of your website. That may take you decades of intense life to acquire. This requirement once met, you now need the Linux server administration knowledge and experience to publish the valuable content. It makes no sense at all to write about internet and computer. That topic alone on its own is of absolutely NO human value to mankind. Internet and computers are but simple tools to transmit, to publish and to process data and information of true human value to mankind.

How much traffic do you need before switching from hosted site to dedicated server?

There are several criteria that need to be met before even considering a move from hosted site to own dedicated root server. First below you see the more obvious criteria, later below the more important ones - traffic and advertising revenue:

Basic prerequisites to move to a dedicated server

You need solid offline experience with the operating system of your choice - most likely Linux. That means you have the very same operating system on your local machine as you plan to have on your remote server. You have years of experience in that operating system!

You are fully familiar with all terms and procedures, with RSS and forums, with site submissions and pings. With serverkey authentication, SSH, etc. knowledge far beyond basic user level. You also have learned to learn by self-study to be free from others as much as possible.

You have successfully created an offline localhost environment with your entire site and all used software and MySQL database in a test environment to practice real life online server situations.

You know shell command lines to remotely control your site without control panel but in a secure environment.

You can solve all problems that possibly might occur either by using Google and search for solutions, by using an existing professional level forum or have at least one or several professional colleagues willing to help you free of charge. Free of charge in return of favors you have done before for them. Hence you have created a positive balance to have friends loving to help you.

You are an experienced and qualified SEO expert and get all your pages indexed and most of your pages into top ten or at very least into top 20 SERPS of all major search engines but at least in Google.

You know now to read, understand and convert existing howto manuals and instructions from the large howto collection available and from existing man pages to solve all basic daily issues instantly and without third party help.

Now the critical prerequisites to be met before moving to dedicated server

You need to have sufficient traffic to easily finance the extra investment of a dedicated server. in addition to the actual server expense, you also may have additional connectivity expense. let me explain. A dedicated server is under near steady attack by hackers. To have your peace of mind, you need at any time of your life a direct access to your server, either by broadband / DSL connection, satellite connection, mobile 3G Internet connection or whatever means. Hence you need a 24/7/365 connectivity even when enjoying life or during travel - else you would be a slave of your dedicated server.

Things will go wrong and if so they usually go wrong during the worst hours, when away from home, during rush hours, high traffic days, etc. Be prepared and be ready to invest into that part of preparation. To have a dedicated server also requires to have multiple ISP to connect to your server in case one main ISP is down. This will happen and has happened to me repeated times. You need to be prepared and have an emergency plan for such cases. Every such additional alternate solutions cost $ !!

You need definitely a solid base of site visitors. That means you never should invest in a dedicated server if your site caters to a small, specialized group of site visitors. Look at today's global economy crisis. You need to survive a situation MUCH worst than what we have now. Our current global crisis is just the beginning of a real global restructuring of human values and priorities.

You should have a site catering to more than one country, to several different interest groups, in more than one language - else you are starting a web publisher career on a weak basis. If your site for example is in Bulgarian only or Italian or Dutch or Portuguese, then your potential site visitors' basis is tiny and subject to change during crisis in such small countries. Ideally you have 2 or more major languages, including English and your site visitors are from as many countries as possible to distribute the risk and to give you as publisher a chance to survive even if one or several countries go into national crisis or national bankruptcy or are involved in warfare or political troubles of any kind.

As a publisher or business man of any type of work, you have to be stronger than the strongest crisis or strongest weakness out on this planet ever can or will be. You have to survive any global crisis, with or without your website. Your website should be just one of many possible jobs you can do to stay alive and prosper while being useful and helpful to mankind.

How much traffic do you need before moving to dedicated server

When I talk traffic, then I mean natural, organic traffic resulting from RSS feeds, from newsletters but above all from major SE. Only true generic traffic ever can bring you either donations for services rendered or advertising revenue to sustain your professional publishing and your entire life.

I won't be able to give you absolute numbers as traffic converted into advertising revenue changes from country to country, from language to language and above all on the topic of your site of course.

But as a long time - in April 2009 it will be 12 years - and full time web publisher I have some fairly acceptable numbers for you. Lets assume you publish about topics, medical topics, technical topics, agriculture, spiritual, life, marriage, etc. You offer real content, real solutions helpful for as many as possible. The you may also attract decent advertisers. That said and defined, a minimum traffic before even considering move from hosting to dedicated server should definitely be at least some 4000-5000 unique visitors per day as an annual average with steadily increasing tendency over the past years!

Investment of a server including any hardware and software and related expenses never should be more than maximum 15-20 % of your total gross revenue from advertising. The purpose of revenue is by no means to spend all but to do something useful with the revenue. Hence there needs to be something left net and cash for:

1. charity and wellbeing of others
2. your future improvements
3. your family, life, housing, etc
4. some recreation or fun for you as well after all above

Hence you need at least an annual advertising revenue of 20'000 to 30'000 US$ before moving from hosted site to dedicated server! Anything else is irresponsible and risky for your entire life, family and wellbeing.

First prove on a hosted site over many years that you can steadily grow your site by creating value for others resulting in a steady increase in traffic and advertising revenue. First learn to overcome minor crisis, major google updates, etc to see how much other factors out of your direct influence may affect your entire online work and success.

If you make your calculations on steady improvement or steady increase of your revenue, then think twice and look first at our current global economy meltdown resulting in a financial crisis. Much of the past advertising revenue came from healthy gadget industries. Means from industries with lots of money from little or no value they offered. Most of such advertisers run out of money or are already out of business these days! For example these past weeks my advertising revenue is less than half of what it once was some 3 years ago. And now the advertising revenue may be much more than double of what it could become in a few years from now.

Hence plan into your calculations and future projections of traffic data that in near future the global economy may be much worst from now. now may be like honeymoon season compared to the potential future! Be prepared to survive and keep working on a fraction of your today's budget and you'll be safe in the future. Be ready to improve your work, increase your efficiency and work much longer hours to survive any REAL crisis.

A really safe minimum traffic number is when you get a solid 10'000 or more unique visitors, when you have an Alexa rank of 100'000 or better, when you maintain such high and steady traffic over all seasons and have site visitors from 100 or more countries from 2 or MORE language zones.

How to safely delay the need for a dedicated server

If you are firmly decided to be a professional publisher and have acquired all needed prerequisites, skills, knowledge, expertise and server security qualifications you still have serious options to wait another year or two on a hosted site. How? easier than how I explain you what gets you - and got me - kicked out of a hosted site plan. There are a few criteria under your sole and full control that will eventually create a situation for your current host to ask you to move within days or weeks to a dedicated server else he may shut down your site or reduce your site's performance.

There particular types of sites or software that consume excessive shares of CPU and/or RAM on your hosted server. A typical server of a hosting company may have up to many hundreds of sites - mostly hobby sites on a single machine. The typical website nowadays is a mini hobby site with nearly no traffic at all.

Following below will drastically increase your CPU usage and memory consumption and thus cause a reaction by your host to get you out of cheap hosting into dedicated server:

1. MySQL database driven pages
2. Forum and CMS
3. Photo gallery - specially gallery2 - consume HUGE amount of resources for moderate traffic and almost no advertising revenue. People look at pics and never on ads !! Good for me - I make photos to be loved and enjoyed. Hence my gallery is a public service and no revenue resource.
4. online eCard systems - they use multiple resources for sending mail: NS and mail-server in addition to CPU and memory.
5. Any software besides regular flat files increases CPU and memory usage

A regular hosting plan can handle a lot of flat file traffic. But as soon as you process data online, use databases, create dynamic pages with PHP and MySQL, then your site sucks hosting resources and you may become an obstacle and burden for all hobby sites. by restricting your online gadgets like forums, ecards, gallery and by focusing on real content, technical content, howtos, etc, you may create first of all a loyal visitor base for your site's basic traffic before venturing into all those many things that may sound or look like being fun but eventually cost you your peace of mind and much of your money as well.

Grow steadily and first prove that you know how to grow with your content and thus how to stay on top of the www at least among the top 100'000. All else is hobby and a hobby never justifies the loss of peace of mind or the huge investment needed to be a successful web publisher amidst a crowd of hackers and cheaters.

If however you are strong, experienced and have fully understood and met above criteria, then Good luck - God bless! Do whatever you do with all your heart and soul, be good and professional, focus on quality above all in all your useful and helpful content.

Love and Bliss

hans