Hi, I'm curious as to how many people here that have their own online company use their own server and how many use ISP(Internet Service Providers). What are some cons and pros of using either, do servers require a really powerful machine?

Thanks.

We lease a dedicated server from rackspace.com. They aren't cheap, but after having used various shared hosting environments since 1995, I could never go back to a shared server. We could host our own server more cheaply perhaps, but I prefer having a team monitoring it 24/7, backed by a strong uptime guarantee. It's like having an extra insurance policy.

One big advantage of a dedicated server is that it can be customized to fit your needs. For instance, we installed server-level spam and virus filters last year, so all our email accounts are automatically covered by this. It's rare that we ever receive an email virus, since they're automatically deleted by the server. Most shared hosting environments won't give you the access you need to install a tool like this. Also, having a 20GB hard drive all to ourselves is rather nice -- space limitations are simply not an issue. Also, our account has the capacity to go up to 4000GB per month before we'd need to upgrade, so we have a pretty fat pipe available as we continue to grow.

Sometimes on a shared hosting environment, you run into resource limitations. I know that sites that host with pair.com and do heavy database access often experience database access errors. Sites with database-driven message boards often have resource problems in such situations. If too many sites try to access the database at once, you experience a traffic jam.

While I notice that other sites are often very slow for me (gamedev.net always seems slow to me, especially their forums), I find that our site runs pretty fast. I think that could be because gamedev.net uses ASP for scripting, while we use PHP. ASP is supposedly a lot slower than PHP. Since it uses ASP, GameDev.net probably hosts on Windows as well.

Think about it this way:

If you are using shared hosting, there could be 100+ other sites on the same server. All it takes is one of them to steal all the cpu, all the bandwidth, get DoS'd, etc, to totally bring down your site. Do you want that?

If not, get a dedicated server :)

Thank you Steve for sharing that. I kind of knew the answer from the start but I just wanted to make sure with the Pros:). You are right I find that gamedev.net runs slow most of the time and whenever I have internet problems, I visit your site because if dexterity.com doesn't work than I'm 99.9% sure its a problem with my connection:).