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If you expect to be building a very large site, or feel that you will
have an extreme amount of traffic, then a dedicated server is probably what you need.
Dedicated Servers are, as their name
indicates, exclusively devoted to serving your
site's content, without interruption. A customer of a shared hosting plan might suffer
if placed on a server with an extremely popular site, or with an extremely high number
of fellow customers, but those with dedicated servers do not have this problem.
Typical Dedicated Server Statistics
Today's dedicated server market starts at about US 100$ per month, which
will get you a 1-1.5 GHz Celeron or Pentium III machine, with 512 MB of RAM, about 60
GB of disk space, and between 500 to 1000 GB of monthly data transfer. Higher capacity
servers will cost 200$-400$ per month, and may use Dual Xeon processors, higher capacity
SCSI hard drives, and greater bandwidth allotments. These prices are for servers which
are "unmanaged", which means that you are leased the server, but you must pay extra for
handholding and non-warranty technical support. If you're a novice, you can usually find
a managed server for 50$-100$ per month extra.
If you're a bargain hunter, you might be able to find a cheaper host, who
may provide you with a lower-power, lower-capacity dedicated server for less than US 100$.
These machines are usually old machines whose leases have been terminated by customers.
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