7 Reasons Why You Should use Dedicated over Cloud Hosting

Are you tired of hearing about the cloud continuously?

The same goes for me.

The cloud provides you with remarkable prospects, but some of the small businesses may cause resistance to the benefits offered by the cloud. Immutable operational processes, incompatible experience, and basic requirements for business often demand a dedicated server as it can prove to be a better hosting solution in comparison to the cloud.

If that’s not enough and you still don’t find it convincing, then there are ample reasons concerning the fact that a dedicated server is a better hosting platform than the cloud. Give a thorough read to this article to understand things in a better way.

What Are the 7 Reasons for Using Cloud Hosting Dedicatedly?

Here is the list of 7 reasons why you should use dedicated over cloud hosting:

1. Performance

Keeping a per-dollar basis as a matter of concern, it is found that dedicated servers provide better performance than cloud hosting.

We have also made use of Rackspace, Softlayer, and AWS. None of them could offer the power that is provided by a properly composed dedicated server.

When disk IO is concerned, this fact gives the best answer to that. Almost in every cloud hosting system, sharing of the network and the fundamental takes place in between the consumers. Because of this, disk I/O can turn out to be uncertain. When some other consumer begins the sharing of large amounts of written requests to the storage array, it may lead to the slowdown of your system. An upstream network is sent so that you can come across bottlenecks there as well.

Whenever we try to troubleshoot the performance-based problems for the consumers with the help of a cloud or VPS, we generally look for the disk IO issues. Mostly, These are often not able to be fixed within the cloud foundation.

Almost every cloud vendor provides you with more storage, not necessarily faster storage.

No doubt that you can conveniently expand the CPU and RAM of your server with the help of most cloud vendors available, but that does not mean that the scaling of disk IO can be done easily too. To understand things better, let us just quickly take the help of an example. As we know that even though Amazon provides us with some high disk IO instances, many users still end up building RAID arrays out of EBS instances so that they can get the performance they require.

In simpler words, if you know that your operational processes are comparatively simple and sorted, then you can simply opt for a single dedicated server with RAID 10 without any second thought as it is able to outperform more costly and complex cloud offerings with ease.

2. Transparency

Every time you try to resolve performance-based issues, one factor that you must always keep in mind is transparency. Transparency is the reason behind us being a fan of NewRelic. NewRelic is a leading observability platform that allows you to look inside your application and search for the bottlenecks. This is because transparency is the key to solving complicated performance and the associated reliability issues.

With so many cloud vendors available out there, it is evident that you will not be able to look behind the curtain and analyze what is actually empowering your operational processes.

Services offered by the cloud can often trigger problems related to the hardware or network. Some of them are listed below:

• While you are sharing services on the cloud, there exist two key issues that can disturb your sharing process. These issues generally do not come up if you opt for a dedicated server.
• When you host something on the cloud, other users can directly affect your workload but this is not possible on a dedicated server.

Some of the hardware errors that can be the reason for outages are mentioned below.

With the help of the cloud, you can share resources and data with other users present in the network. This is inclusive of the disk, RAM, CPU, and network. Cloud software helps you out in fencing into your neighbors, but you should know that the fence has holes. Sometimes, due to the inherent design or more complex configuration choices, a single user may overload a local compute node. This can lead to temporary outages or cause performance issues for the operations you want to carry out that have nothing to do with you.

It is quite unfortunate that many providers will never be able to figure out or even seize this problem. The result is that you will have to keep track of performance and add on to your workload.

Errors related to the hardware are just another issue. Apart from them, with the use of SoftLayer’s service, whenever we have come across hardware issues on any computing platform, we are not able to approve our suspicions in any way. What maximum we can do is simply shift the instance to some other physical node and check if the problem is still existing or not.

This migration of instances from one physical node to another becomes easy with the use of cloud hosting, but a dedicated server may not necessarily do these migrations. If you make use of a dedicated system, you can just simply check the hardware and exclude the issues. With the help of this, you will be able to concentrate diagnostic efforts on the right problems.

3. Redundancy

Few concepts about the cloud are usually interpreted inappropriately. One of the most common misconceptions about the cloud is that it is intrinsically redundant. This is not necessarily true.

A node is a computing service provided by the cloud that is usually no more reliable in comparison to a single dedicated server.

In cloud computing, the computer node is generally just an inventory server that is non-inclusive of the storage. This means that the node and your workload are related to each other in such a way that if the former dies, so does the latter. This is very much similar to the failure of the CPU, RAM, or power supply on a dedicated server.

Even when you are using the cloud, you are required to develop redundancy into your system beforehand. The reason is that heading on to the AWS directly is not going to help in making your SMB’s hosting service more authentic or more redundant until and unless you try to make it that way.

Just have a look at the setup on AWS. This is a very complicated process and it demands a good amount of time in setting up, monitoring and maintaining.

It is because of the absence of transparency and added complexity that you can convince yourself about the fact that the single cloud instances are less reliable or authentic when compared to their dedicated server counterparts.

4. Complexity

Any platform that involves complex processing should be avoided as it can be exhausting and frustrating as well.

Cloud operations being remarkably redundant can prove to be very complex. This, in turn, lightens the need to use a dedicated server over cloud hosting even more.

Cloud infrastructure, more specifically with the AWS, can lead to several complexities that you may not even ask for. The reason behind this is the fact that with the help of AWS, your IP addresses are not bounded to a specific EC2 instance on their own. If you begin by stopping an instance first and then start it again, you are supposed to ensure that you do not forget to re-associate your IP address. Similarly, the EBS storage may also be ended up with an error message. AWS provides you with various tools to prevent you from making mistakes, but the condition is that you must make sure to enable them.

All the issues like these do not even exist if you make use of a dedicated server. So what is the point in choosing a complex infrastructure when you are not even going to utilize it?

After managing infrastructures for a long time now, one thing we have learned so far is that: simpler is better. This is the reason why we keep on recommending choosing dedicated servers over any other hosting platforms for simple hosting operations.

Not just that, complexity adds to the cost both of the hardware and getting expert help.

5. Cost

Cloud hosting costs more. So, it is pretty obvious that it is going to add to your overall fund expenditure.

This fact holds good for many small-scale businesses such as design firms, most importantly web development.

Let’s take into account a web marketing organization that hosts its consumer’s sites. Some of the most common applications required to do so include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and other popular CMS programs. Apart from them, you may also need a hosting control panel just like Plesk or cPanel.

Every time you try to detect the technical requirements that are essential to ensure authentic performance for your sites, you will always end up concluding that dedicated servers stand out of all the other hosting platforms available.

Disk performance is the main reason behind it. There are chances that you may find VPS or cloud systems face problems with either site being in bulk or high consistency. This disk IO issue can be resolved with the help of a cloud by creating RAID arrays out of the storage units, but this can increase the overall expenses. Once you begin to add bandwidth, control panels, and IP addresses, the cost savings start increasing remarkably.

Moreover, the AWS fee is not even inclusive of the Control Panel which therefore evaporates the total cost every month.

Making direct comparisons between cloud hosting and dedicated server in terms of cost is not an easy task, no matter what. Sometimes, you may even want to over establish the infrastructure of the cloud infrastructure to solve some of the performance-based issues. Even if you have an idea about what exactly do you need, costs cannot remain fixed with many cloud services.

6. Lock-in

Make sure that you never get locked in.

This is because getting locked into a platform provided by the vendor may get you in trouble. Migration of instances just seems to be easy but that is not true. It can rather end up being excruciating and costly.

In short, getting locked into a vendor can become problematic for you.

With ample cloud vendors available out there, if you try and start consolidating more complicated services, you may end up finding that you have locked yourself into their solutions. Consequently, it can be treacherous if any of their support, services or pricing changes. The vendor does not necessarily change, but your business or technical requirements may alter. So it is highly recommended that you must analyze the migration options available before you proceed with the selection of a cloud vendor.

There is no doubt about the fact that the compute portion of cloud services is usually quite similar between vendors, but advanced services just like object-based storage, database abstraction layers, and other techniques might have different APIs. So, if you want to develop your app to make use of Amazon’s S3, you will be required to reconfigure it to work with some other object-based storage model. This can make the migration of instances challenging and expensive.

It has been often observed that companies make use of the advanced services offered by the cloud vendors even when no solution is required by any business or technology. Consequently, you will end up creating a vendor lock-in even when it could be avoided easily by using a dedicated server.

Generally, dedicated servers are assets. If you are using a hosting control panel like Plesk or cPanel, migration of instances from one server to another server or service provider is an easy and substantiated process.

So does it make sense to risk a vendor lock-in, when all of your business and technical needs can be easily fulfilled by a dedicated server? Obviously no!

7. Scalability

Scaling is one of the most important marketing points for cloud services. But your applications or the operations you are carrying out may not be always ready to scale while you are scaling your computing resources.

If you want to make use of a hosting control panel, it is important to know that your scalability options will be limited. You can boost your CPU/RAM or just simply use a dedicated database, but all these options are already provided by dedicated servers. Cloud just makes this task simpler.

As it was already mentioned before that scaling disk IO is typically not available or limited within the cloud. For purposes such as performance optimization, the main performance problem is caused by disk IO, especially when the operations are carried out via shared hosting.

Do not let the advertisements fool you. It makes no sense if you expect your operations to grow automatically on their own when you have not even planted them in the garden of the cloud vendor.

Whenever you aim to create applications and manage them, always keep the scalability factor in mind. This is because if you are trying to load legacy applications into a modern, scalable, and clouded framework, it may often lead to failure.

Now that we have talked about the scalability factor so much, a question that may strike your mind is why is it so important to scale anyway?

Do not worry. We are here to answer all your questions. If your websites are performing slow, there are chances that the cloud can solve this problem by simply optimizing your server’s configuration and fixing bottlenecks in your application.

Let’s just brief up the things now. If you own a small-scale business and you only have relatively simple hosting operations, then the use of dedicated servers is the one-stop solution for you. No doubt that the pressure from consumers to make use of the cloud is quite authoritative. You should know that what they see is nothing else but just marketing hype.

The ground reality is that a properly managed dedicated server usually provides you with better performance and authenticity at lower expenses in comparison to the cloud service options currently available.

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