Taking The Plunge, Dedicated Host vs Shared Hosting

Anyone who would care enough to look at the DNS of this domain name would see that this particular blog is hosted on Dreamhost. Dreamhost is a shared hosting solution that I’ve been using for about 4 years now. I originally signed up with them for like $7 for the first year and have been paying about $120 a year since. They have some features that I absolutely love:

• Unlimited Domains Hosted
• Unlimited MySQL Database
• One Click Installs of things like WordPress
• Unlimited Email Accounts
• Unlimited Bandwidth

Now most hosts offer this stuff for around the same price now a days but when I signed up for Dreamhost they were by FAR the cheapest solution. Well them and Media Temple now that I think back on it. So what is shared hosting you ask? Well basically it means that one server will host multiple clients and you share that server’s resources. I would immagine they put anywhere from 20-30 clients on a single server. This is usually fine for most people. The load speeds you have might be perfectly fine for what you want to do. However you also suffer the problem that if someone else on your same server is using a decent ammount of resources then there isn’t much left for you and that makes your site go slower!

There is another ‘middle’ option for some people. It is called Virtual Private Hosting. VPS is when they give you a Virtual Server on their server and you get a dedicated portion of it to yourself. So you might get a guaranteed 2GB of RAM available to you at all times. This solution works for a lot of people and VPS are typically about 3-8x the price of a shared solution depending on where you go.  Hosts usually claim not to put more than 10 VPS on a single server, however we really have no way to validate this, and there are still shared resources on a VPS.

So what about Dedicated Hosting? Well dedicated hosting is the grand daddy of all hosting solutions! Sorry for the overhype, its really not that exciting… It simply means that you have a dedicated server that only you are on. So if your site goes down it wasn’t because you had some other deutsche on your server hosting a 500MB video clip that had 50 people downloading it, killing your bandwidth. There are a few other perks that come along with it but these can also sometimes be utilized in a VPS. Static IP that only goes to your site, guaranteed system specs, guaranteed bandwidth, etc.

So why am I making the switch?

Well recently I’ve been really digging into CPV marketing. Traditionally I utilized CPC advertising and that essentially is a voluntary click by the user so they probably won’t mind a 3-10 second load time since they want to see the landing page. However with CPV the user can’t wait to close down the pop up as soon as it arrives, so if it takes longer than about a second for your ad to load it was a wasted view. Below are my recent stats for Media Traffic and DirectCPV ads. I am going to show you the percentage of people that visited the site as compared to what I paid for. Now I fully expect that I won’t hit 100% but I would like to be in the 90%+ region for sure!

Media Traffic %
3/16: 92% – Saw my lander
3/17: 83% – Saw my lander
3/18: 62% – Saw my lander – wtf

What does this mean? Well it could be a whole bunch of crap. I mostly attribute it to that I had a frequency cap of 1/24 so people began seeing the same ad each day and just instantly closing it when they got the pop up. I could also say that on 3/18 I know my server was down for a few minutes and that load times were horrendously slow that day. All these landing pages were about 250KB in size.

DirectCPV %

I was running DirectCPV ads for a little bit longer so I figured I would give you a rough display of how my landing pages broke down from size.
87% - 15kb all text landing page.
41% – 250kb landing page.

To myself, these stats are UNACCEPTABLE. On the 250kb landing page I lost almost 60% of the traffic I was paying for!? That would’ve been enough savings to put my campaigns in the green! So now is this all my hosts fault? Without a doubt NO. My landers should definitely be smaller in size and that is just stuff I have to keep optimizing. Part of that optimization is to see if a dedicated host can help, so here we go!

I ended up signing up with Volsh who charges about $150 a month. Its not fully setup yet so I can’t really review them, but stay tuned I will update you more as it comes!! In the meantime wish me luck with the new box.

*UPDATE 7/1/10*
Volsh hosting went out of business and overall the service from the owner James Volsh was horrible. The guy even ended up screwing me out of money and deassociated the companies banks from PayPal before they shut down so none of their clients could request refunds. I then transferred over to SingleHop and have had much better experiences.

In addition Dedicated hosting, like Peer 1 hosting services, is reliable and an excellent option.