How many sites can I put on dedicated hosting?

Hi all,

Currently will be moving to dedicated hosting to have some of my web design clients on.

Wondering if anyone can shed some light on some good options/resources out there that can get me started with understanding how many websites are appropriate for a dedicated or even cloud server.

I know there's a million things that goes into why its not an easy answer, but I work with mainly small business who get little traffic.

If there's any guide that shows optimal server stats for certain expected traffic or content size, I would really appreciate it!

Just looking for a nudge in the right direction

Dedicated hosting or dedicated server?
Depends what actually this "dedicated hosting" is. Give us link to this dedicated hosting specs so we can see more details.

how many websites are appropriate for a dedicated or even cloud server.

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Dedicated server with dual CPU and NVME ssd disks is way different from $5 /mo cloud server.

Also depends what websites you host, WP, html, something different?

It's depend on your hosting.

Guys already replied what they could given your description, but most dedicated servers hosted on 100 Mbps ports are way overpowered than anything you would need.
These days, dedicated servers usually fail when network connection in data center is crap (which is more important than actual hw config), or if dev blatantly used every
single anti-pattern and cripples his site to work even on a supercomputer.

Web framework benchmark site (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) uses Xeons with 32 GB RAM on GbE and can achieve something like 7000 responses per
second with php laravel, multiple SQL queries test. That should give you around 18 billion hits per month, which is more than enough for anything other than G or FB.

That being said, what I usually advise my clients is to get a dedi with some VM tailored distribution like VMWare or SmartOS and run the whole infrastructure on it
(Firewall, DNS, Mail, Web, App, DB). For that application, just get your self a nice single (dual if you can) Xeon with 64 (128 if you can) GBs, dual ssd with
dual sata drives for storage (RAID 1) and host it on 1 GbE. This should take you a long way.

Really appreciate the replies @satyr85 and @Redaline

To be honest I think my knowledge on hosting may not be up to par yet to make this switch.

I currently host my small business clients (Wordpress sites) on individual siteground's shared hosting plans. But have had bottleneck/speed/server response issues with some sites that I'd like to avoid. As I'm scaling, I was looking at their cloud hosting packages and was thinking that may be a route that would be easier to manage and terms of performance?

Is there anywhere I should start to learn more about the best plan of action? Or anything you guys recommend? Not sure of the typical route that web designers take to begin getting their clients on my own hosting rather than individual shared plans everytime.

Appreciate the advice!

Start off with a reseller account. Then when you have speed issues or whatever upgrade to a VPS. From there go to a dedicated server. I wouldn't make the jump from shared hosting to dedicated unless I had a big influx of clients that were coming in quickly or I knew I was going to start hosting a big resource hog.

Also the problem is probably just your host. I would consider looking at other reputable hosts. Not sure if I can post it here but there is a very popular webhosting forum that has reviews, pricing and a lot of the info that you need to make an educated decision.

Take a look at webhostingtalk or lowendtalk and look for "managed vps/dedicated server". You could get managed dedicated server for around $100/mo. For you it would work like a shared hosting because hosting company take care about all linux stuff. You are on dedicated machine = you have dedicated resources, everything work well. Be sure to get this managed server directly from company that owns data center. In case of problems with hardware etc middleman is equal to hours of downtime. Take a look at hetzner, ioflood, servercomplete etc.

@MaestroDelWeb and @satyr85 great replies.

I think reseller hosting is what I will do for now. Web design is my thing but it's clear now that I have a lot to learn about hosting before I switch to a dedicated machine.

I'm going to look into the reseller hosting for now until I'm confident in my understanding of dedicated servers, which then I'll make the switch for my current and upcoming clients. Don't want to rush into it unless I'm 100% positive.

Thanks again lads!

BlackGrumps said:

Really appreciate the replies @satyr85 and @Redaline

To be honest I think my knowledge on hosting may not be up to par yet to make this switch.

I currently host my small business clients (Wordpress sites) on individual siteground's shared hosting plans. But have had bottleneck/speed/server response issues with some sites that I'd like to avoid. As I'm scaling, I was looking at their cloud hosting packages and was thinking that may be a route that would be easier to manage and terms of performance?

Is there anywhere I should start to learn more about the best plan of action? Or anything you guys recommend? Not sure of the typical route that web designers take to begin getting their clients on my own hosting rather than individual shared plans everytime.

Appreciate the advice!

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No problem. As @satyr85 said, your best bet is managed dedi hosting, that can take you a long way. Cloud hosting (real cloud, AWS or Azure, bare VPS is a whole different thing), is something you should avoid at this time, since it takes more to configure it than bare bone dedi server, is more expensive and has lower performance than standalone machine.

The only route I can recommend you is the one I took, and that is to find Linux focused tutorials that are around on sites like howtoforge or Digital Ocean and than slowly advance through topics. One of the benefits of running on Linux is that technology is battle tested due to its Unix roots and only slowly changes over time, so there is a high chance that something you learn today will be applicable in the next 5 years or so.

In addition to that, it really makes a difference if you know how to configure server and monitor its performance in comparison to be left guessing what is wrong with shared hosting plan you chose.

BlackGrumps said:

@MaestroDelWeb and @satyr85 great replies.

I think reseller hosting is what I will do for now. Web design is my thing but it's clear now that I have a lot to learn about hosting before I switch to a dedicated machine.

I'm going to look into the reseller hosting for now until I'm confident in my understanding of dedicated servers, which then I'll make the switch for my current and upcoming clients. Don't want to rush into it unless I'm 100% positive.

Thanks again lads!

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As I wrote above - for end user (you) there is no real difference between managed dedi/vps and shared hosting. Lets say you buy cpanel/directadmin based managed dedicated server - you get access to cpanel/directadmin and thats all - rest is done by hosting company. Reseller hosting is nothing special at all, you can be also on oversold node and you will see problems you see now.

Overall when it comes to linux - one-time proper configuration done via skilled guy and your server is hands off for months/years. I run alot stuff on linux, its mostly good one-time config and you are done, scripts run forever until hardware is broken . If you have good budget (for example this $100/month) I would give managed vps/dedi a try.

For peace of mind go reseller. Get use to whatever control panel you are using (I usually go with CPanel but may be switching to DirectAdmin over the next few years since the price increase was disrespectful the way it was done). Spend a little more to get good hosting. I have reseller accounts with anywhere from 20 sites to 200 sites. I spread it out between different hosts. In time you see which hosts are very good. I also pay less than a dedicated server and don't have to worry about server administration, updates, etc... Support tickets on my main hosts are generally answered very quickly and with the solution, instead of going back and forth with a larger host.

For years I ran dedicated servers and VPS's. Even managed ones you have to stay on top of the companies to do updates. With reseller hosting they do all of that automatically and if there is a feature you need you ask them to install/update it (which isn't very often in my case).

There are advantages to a dedicated server and VPS like installing as many custom scripts as you want and using up all of the resources but I've found for 99% of the clients I work with I don't need it. I have had VPS needs almost every year but usually they are temporary needs where my reseller accounts I use them year round.

for safety how about one blog per with one dedicated hosting ita more unique and also safe for your blog and secure