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Servers are very reliable today. But the demand for them to work 7x24 has increased dramatically over the years. For this reason, many aspects of a server should be monitored. How are you going to monitor that the server is not low on disk space or running out of memory before you have a problem?

Leased Server: You can contract a number of online providers to monitor your server (about $10-50 per month) and notify you if a threshold is met. It is then up to you to get to the server (either physically go to the server or log in somehow) and see what the problem is, diagnosis it and fix it. It’s the response and repair that can be really expensive, especially if you need it on very short notice.

Dedicated Server: At Online Tech we monitor your server from multiple monitoring locations (including some from other geographies on the Internet) so that we always know the state of your server. Any issues cause alarms to be immediately sent to multiple engineers who then will pounce on the problem and work to resolve the issue and get the server back on line.

Savings: $10 - $50 per month plus response time to alarms.

Did you know that for some servers it can cost as much to power the server as it does to purchase it? When calculating the power costs, don’t forget the cooling. If you have a server that draws 500 watts of power, it will cost at least another 500 watts to cool it. 500 Watts of power costs about $40/month (.12 cents / KWHr), plus the cost to cool it is another $40/month – so that’s $80/month just for the power. And that’s “raw” power (see our blog entry on data center power). You also need to protect against power spikes and brownouts as they can actually damage the server.

Leased Server: At a minimum, purchasing an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) to keep your server running for a few hours when you lose power will run about $1000- $1500. After several hours, you need a generator to keep the server, network and Internet connection gear powered. Generators are extremely capital intensive.

Dedicated Server: All dedicated servers at Online Tech are kept in one of our SAS-70 audited data centers which include industrial size Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) and at least one generator.

Savings: $1000 - $1500 plus generator backups.

How are you going to backup the information on the server? How are you going to protect from data-loss due to fire, flood or theft of your data?

Leased Server: You can purchase a tape backup system with tapes or a disk backup system and take the data offsite to your home or other place regularly. If your building burns down at least you won’t have a total data loss. You should consider what happens if you misplace the backup data? Will your data be secure? Backup hardware and software can run $200 to $1,000. Also be sure to budget 2-4 hours per week of someone’s time to get the backups prepared and to make sure the backups are completed properly.

Dedicated Server: Online Tech’s offers tape-less, no-touch onsite and offsite (replicated through our private network to a data center 50 miles away) backup, much more cost effectively than having someone come and pick up your tapes.

Savings: $200 - $1000 plus 2-4 hours per week of time.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers"

A "naked" unprotected server on the Internet will be found and compromised by Internet robots in less than 45 minutes. So how are you going to secure the server from hackers?

Leased Server: Buy and manage security devices such as firewall; Intrusion Detection; Port Scan; SQL Injection and other types of attacks. You can hire a company to audit your server every 90 days and suggest/recommend additional security measures to keep abreast of the threats as they increase exponentially. These can be purchased for between $500 and $5000. Budget 4-8 hours of engineer time ($400 - $800) to setup the device and a few hours a month to monitor it do updates so you can stay ahead of the hackers. You’ll also need to budget 20% of the price of the security device for an annual subscription for virus updates. In the end the security will cost you more than the server and you just can’t live without it.

Dedicated Server: All Online Tech dedicated servers are protected by hardware firewalls with an easy upgrade to the state of the art Universal Threat Management offering powered by WatchGuard. These provide protection against Port Scans, Intrusion Detection and other nefarious threats.

Savings: $900 - $5800 plus $100 - $1000 per year on maintenance.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers"

How are you going to connect your server to the Internet? Will it be secure? What happens if your internet connection goes down for a few hours? How expensive is an Internet failure?

Leased Server: For the same level of uptime, you’ll need to contract for two different Internet companies and put both internet connections into a network router and program to sense when one of the connections fails and automatically fail over to the backup connection. Cost: $500 to $1000 for the network device and programming plus an additional Internet connection. An extra T1 line is likely to cost an extra $400 - $500 per month.

Dedicated Server: All Online Tech dedicated servers have dual, redundant connections to our redundant Cisco network which is connected to two separate Internet providers over gigabit fiber connections. It’s an infrastructure few companies can afford for themselves.

Savings: $500 - $1000 upfront and $400 - $500 per month.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers".

Leased Server: For any level of security, you’ll need to commit to a data closet with a locked door, proper cooling, maybe webcams or biometric finger print reader, alarms and other systems to protect the server from physical damage or loss or at least provide some forensic evidence as to who stole it should it go missing. The closet with proper cooling can start at $1000.

Dedicated Server: Online Tech places your dedicated server is in our SAS-70 audited data center with dual-factor authentication and biometrics for physical access, video cameras and locked in a secure private cage or rack.

Who’s going to unpack, configure, test and fire up your server? It’s easy to underestimate the time and importance of setting up a server right the first time. If you don’t build the server properly, the software won’t run properly or it will be highly insecure.

Leased Server: Hire a Systems Engineer to configure the server properly. To properly build, test and deploy a server can take 2 days of an engineer’s time. At $100/hour that’s $1,600.

Dedicated Server: Online Tech sets up the hardware, tests it, mounts it in our server racks, installs the OS all patches, scans for viruses, sets up the security, networking and firewall, installs multiple OS add-ons and any other software you wish.

Savings: $1,600.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers"

What's the difference between a dedicated server and a leased server?  A lot.  It’s like the difference between leasing a ship and taking a cruise. The difference isn’t just between a raw component and a complete service, it also impacts the total cost of total cost of ownership (TCO).

The e-Tips article gives 7 tips for how you can cut costs by leveraging a dedicated server solution over leasing a server. The 7 tips discuss set up costs, physical security, quality of the Internet connection, Internet security, back up costs, power and monitoring.

A good way to net out the difference between a leased server and a dedicated server is shown in the following table:

SAS-70 stands for the “State on Auditing Standards No. 70”. They were created to to identify organizations willing to hold themselves to a proven and higher standard of commitment. It’s essentially an audit of “controls” that you claim to have regarding physical and logical protection of your data center.

What is a “control”? It’s a process, policy or tool (hardware or software) you have in place designed to enforce a specific claim. For example, at Online Tech we have controls in place to make sure that only appropriate people have physical access to our data centers. Our SAS-70 audit then was conducted by having a 3^rd party CPA visit Online Tech and confirm that the controls we claim to have are really in place.

There are two types of audits: Type 1 and Type 2. A type 1 audit is done for a specific point in time. The auditor will visit and confirm your controls were in place on a specific date when they visited. A type 2 audit is for a period of time, for example, a 6 month period. During that period of time the auditing firm will regularly visit and assure that during that period the controls were firmly in place as claimed.

Most organizations first get a type 1 then proceed, over-time to complete the type 2 audit. Once the type 2 audit is complete it is generally good for at least 6 months then the audit is done again to ensure compliance for the next year.

A SAS-70 audit is done by a CPA firm and a data security expert with experience in data center and network security. First the organization prepares a list of claimed controls. The auditors then visit, interview employees, review systems, procedures and documents to confirm that the claimed controls are in fact in place. Any controls that are not perfectly in place will get an “exception” notice. Ideally your SAS-70 report should have “no relevant exception” rating for every control.

As well the SAS-70 audit report will contain a “statement of controls” from the auditor. This statement gives an opinion as to whether or not these controls, taken together, are sufficient and consistent with typical practices for the type of services and work being performed.

The end result is that a data center with a SAS-70 audit is more likely to be secure and reliable.

The term “Dedicated Server” became common with the birth of the web hosting industry. Hosting providers like Online Tech would put multiple web sites on a single server. This became known as “shared" server hosting.

Due to security or volume, some websites required a server that was “dedicated” to just their website. That dedicated server wouldn't host any other websites and a company could do whatever they wanted to that server- hence the term “dedicated server” was born.

Dedicated servers are contracted for a certain number of months (e.g. 24) for a specific monthly fee (e.g. $ 199/month). This generally includes: the server hardware; part replacement including service; a secure data center environment (but not always); and a connection to the Internet. The server configuration (mostly the selection of CPU, disk space and memory), the amount of internet access and the quality of the hardware, and the type of data center will generally dictate the monthly fees.

Dedicated server hosting is ideal for companies who want to focus their IT staff on leveraging the power of their applications rather than managing the server, network and data centers. Generally, a dedicated server does not include server management functions like security, backups, restores, system administration functions and monitoring that a "managed" dedicated server would include.

In an upcoming posting we'll talk more about the differences between a raw dedicated server and a managed dedicated server and the pros and cons of each.