[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Have you ever wondered if a home web server is able to compete against a dedicated web hosting provider? we conducted a small scale test in order to examine the potential for home web serversWe tried to make the test as fair as possible in regards to configuration, we could have installed Linux on our home user PC to make the test more fair but I guess running windows 7 should be a disadvantage when it comes to web servers operating systems

We mainly focused on website response time instead of which server could handle the most load due to the hardware spec being very different.

We focused on testing webpage response time, We tested each server for 24 hours checking response time every minute from various other servers around the world to make the test more fair (America, Australia, France, Russia etc)

[/vc_column_text][vc_progress_bar values=”760|Overall Average,1150|Slowest Average,489|Fastest Average” bgcolor=”bar_red” options=”striped” title=”Dedicated Server Results” units=”ms”][vc_progress_bar values=”425|Overall Average,1100|Slowest Average,89|Fastest Average” bgcolor=”bar_green” options=”striped” title=”Home User Server Results:” units=”ms”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Page speed was measured using webpagetest.org from 30 different locations worldwide

Based on this test results it makes people wonder why we pay £70+ a month for a dedicated server now lets add up the pros and cons

Dedicated Server

Pros

• Redundancy
• Parallels Panel (Depending on your skill it can be a con)
• Dedicated IP (Depending if you really need it)

Cons

• Expensive
• Old/Slow hardware for what you pay for
• Server can be upgraded by the company without your permission (As explained below)
• Internet connection not always what is advertised

Home Server:

Pros

• Full control over software
• Full control over hardware
• More modern hardwar
• Faster internet connection based on the test above (Varies a lot from user to user)

Cons:

• Lack of redundancy
• Personal network security threat
• ISP might not be happy with you hosting a website

As mentioned above “Server can be upgraded by the company without your permission” what i mean by this, recently 1&1 decided to replace my dedicated server with a newer one with a more modern hardware. They send me an email stating this will happen on this day and early hours of the morning and none of my data will be lost it will just be a simple server change over and all data will be moved to the new server which will cause a 1 hour downtime. I thought is about time due to the server being very slow whilst running a few magneto stores and joomla CMS websites. The day comes i wake up and decide to log on to one of my websites to see what the performance difference is, to my surprise the website wouldn’t load. I tried a few other websites and nothing, I tried accessing the server via SSH and again no luck the server is completely dead. I contacted 1&1 and their reply was i must of changed some settings on the server which caused it to erase everything. The joke of it is i haven’t touched or logged in to the server for over 6 months so that was impossible so their verdict is 1&1
messed up and now all my data is gone with no chance of compensation.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]