Is a Dedicated Server a Worthwhile Investment?
-
Greeting MOZ Community:
Our site is hosted on a virtual private server. Apparently there are dozens of other web sites hosted on the same server. The performance is usually pretty fast, with the site downloading in 1-3 seconds. However, a few times per month, the performance slows down, to say 5-6 seconds. Please see the attached image.
I suspect this may have something to do with the other web sites on the server.
Currently we pay about $60/month. A dedicated server would cost about $120/month. Would site performance be more consistent on a dedicated server? Could we enjoy potential SEO benefits by having our own server, i.e. could we rank slightly higher if the speed was more consistent and the performance slightly faster?
Thanks, Alan
-
I don't think that can be had for the price. I pay around $260 for a single xeon with a ssd and 8 gig.
-
The answer will depend to a degree on the load that your traffic places on the server and the quality of the equipment in your server.
If you get one with a nice amount of memory, fast processor and solid state harddrive then the speed increase could be so pronounced that you will be able to tell when it goes into service without being told... at the same time that could be overkill if your traffic is modest.
Getting efficient images and caching working could have a greater impact on speed than the equipment.
If you do both then you will have the best situation.
-
You cut-off load sample size on your screenshot. If the sample size is low, the data is not that accurate and more measurement may be needed.
You are right though, one of the key factors in migration to a dedicated server is your page load times.
-
If you can give a bit more info about the site that would help.
Cost Benefit and load time can be subjective depending on the industry and also what load time is for the normal user and how much "Load Time" is the next issue to tackle on your SEO list of things to do. You might get far more gains in authority by focusing on core weaknesses such as content, social, and link building that you will gain from the cost spend on a dedicated server
Hope that that is useful.
Bruce
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Server update to ipv6, SEO consequences
Hi all, I read the article from 2014 on MOZ regarding ipv6.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
https://moz.com/blog/ipv6-cblocks-and-seo Our technical department is about to change our server from ipv4 to ipv6.
Are there any things we have to consider regarding SEO / rankings / duplicate content etc.. with this transition? I hope you have a little spare time to answer this question. Regards,
Tom1 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Redirect at Registrar or Server
Hi folks, I have run into a situation were a new client has 3 TLDs (e.g. mycompany.com, mycompany.org and mycompany.biz), all with the same content. They are on a Windows IIS environment, which I am not familiar with. Until now, all of my clients have been Linux/Apache environment, so I always dealt with these issues utilizing htaccess. Currently all resolve to the same IP, but the URL remains the same in the browser address field (e.g. if you type-in mycompany.org - it remains as such). We want the .org and .biz version to 301 Redirect to the .com TLD. I am wondering what the best practice might be in this situation? Could we simply redirect at the registrar level or would implementation at the server level be best? If so, I would really appreciate an example from someone with experience implementing redirects on IIS. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Server requests: 302 followed by a 200
Hi, On an IIS system clicking a particular link the following response codes are returned: GET /nl/nl/process?Someparameter1=1&Someparameter2=2 302 found GET /nl/nl/SomeOtherPage.cms 200 OK What concerns me, besides the obvious 302 and the cAmeLcAse canonical issues is the 200 response without a redirect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muffin
What page will then be indexed, ranked and what effect does this have on the pagerank flow, if the 302 was to be changed into a 301?
Also would extention .cms be an issue? Thanks for any answers. Edit. I contacted the developer. He says it's a rewrite, not a meta redirect.
I still think, this rewrite is an issue? Canonical maybe?0 -
How to handle web server downtime?
We have a client who is taking their web server down Saturday morning from 1am - 7am for planned maintenance. Initially, we thought to have all requests return a 503 (service unavailable) response but the web server itself will be down so we are not able to have it return any response codes. Updating the DNS on the registrar will have too much lag time while it propogates out so we aren't sure exactly how to handle this. I had thought possibly of using a second DNS, or a service like DynDNS but that seems like a large amount of effort to set up just for some planned downtime. I have to imagine that Google understands planned website/server downtime every once in a great while. This client has pretty good rankings for some incredibly competitive terms so we want to do all that we can to make sure those rankings are preserved. What are some other potential solutions? We could totally just be overthinking this but we'd rather be safe than sorry... Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Changing Servers + Effect on SEO
Hi, I am currently with a very slow server. Our website takes quite a while to load, FTP is very slow and content changes with Wordpress are slow because even the database connection takes a lot of time. However, my website ranks very well. Traffic has doubled in the last year. Our domain has been registered with this company for over 10 years. I am wondering if changing to a different hosting provider would have an effect on my rankings due to the change in IP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan160 -
How to handle a server outage if I have two sites
I operate a web application. It consists of two sites, www.mysite.com and app.mysite.com. As you might imagine, www is used for marketing purposes, and it's our main organic search entry point. The app.mysite.com domain is where our application portal is for customers, and it is also where our login and registration pages are located. Currently, www.mysite.com is experiencing a catastrophic outage and is returning 504 errors, but app.mysite.com is on a totally separate system with a lot redundancy, and is doing just fine. If we get traffic from referrals or search, we want that traffic to be able to login and register, so we've replaced the 504 error with a 302 redirect to app.mysite.com until the situation is resolved. This provides the best possible experience for users (nothing's worse than a 504). How will this affect SEO? Is there something other than a 302 that I should be doing with the broken www.mysite.com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ehren0 -
High Ranking Site with tons of junk on the server
Hey All, So to make a long story short, we own a site that has been passed through many hand and many strategies. We are in the financial field and rank high for many relevant search terms. My job is now to audit/optimize and purge out site of the garbage that has collected over the years (since 2002). During the audit I have found many issues, fized them, but I am not sure own how to proceed with the follwing issues. Any advice to solve the following would be greatly appreciated! 9932 orphan files - does just removing them affect my SEO.. I like a clean house, can I somehow use them to my benefit? Hundreds of 404s with many external "follow" links that we are no longer getting juice from 8 Sitelinks in webmaster tools, but only 4 show in our search I am straight n00b so sorry if this is 101 for anyone you but your input would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s0