The pros and cons of having your own dedicated server to manage and the pros and cons of getting it from a dedicated hosting service? And what type of website would benefit for either of them?
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If you run your own server you can do any downloads and upgrades, run whatever software you want. But YOU have to manage it and make it work. You’ll probably be running older software because you don’t want to take the whole system down, and possibly not get it up again, to upgrade. If you have a power outage you are completely offline and unavailable to your customers.
If you have a dedicated hosting service like GoDaddy, Google or Yahoo, they have hundreds of engineers and IT people constantly maintaining and managing the servers, with multiple backup systems and virtually unlimited bandwidth. Generally, you get current software, current technology, full time network staff, multi-location hosting, etc.
I agree with David except he left out one thing, which is speed. If your server resides in your building, you’re going to be able to access it at the speed of your local network, often 100Mb or even 1Gb/s. If the server is hosted remotely, you access the files over the internet. a typical broadband internet connection is perhaps 1-5Mb/s. So in the best case scenario access to the hosted server is going to be 1/20th as fast as access to the local server.
If you’re only storing and retrieving very small files and you need to do it from many remote locations, hosted is a good option. If you’re mostly working from one location and use the server any more than a little bit, a local server is your best bet.
Hope this helps, and feel free to check out http://www.inovagent.com/file_servers for more information on local file servers.