Why I love private servers

[Ghost]

Dedicated servers and virtual private servers can be extremely beneficial for your website, even if you don't need the resources. It's not always about disk space and bandwidth, or even speed... Although you will almost always experience significant improvements in all of those areas when you are on a VPS or Dedi compared to a standard shared server. One main reason I love having a private server, whether it's for a website or not, is the ability to have full control over what is installed on the server. You can choose between Linux and Windows obviously to start, but you can also decide what is truly needed. You can run a server with MySQL and barely anything else installed, or you could run a desktop OS on your server to have your own remote computer to access from anywhere - even a cell phone. Or perhaps you want to run a Python server without PHP even installed. Having your own private server allows you to do all of this - You can have as much or as little as you want on there. This is great because you do not have to deal with all of the bloat that standard web hosting servers have... They need to accommodate a lot of customers, so it's pretty rare that you could get a shared hosting account with almost nothing except for MySQL (to run an efficient database server).

I know we all focus on speed, bandwidth, disk space, etc, but that's not the end all discussion point when it comes to servers. I have personally found the greatest benefit to be the flexibility with server set up, security, and the ability to restart/shut down your own server when needed. You can control what goes on, and if you own the hardware instead of renting you can even upgrade your hardware piece by piece.

What do you all think about private servers? What are some of the benefits that keep you renting/buying server space, or what do you think will be the main reason you will pay for your first VPS or dedicate server?

 

[sn0w]

What do you all think about private servers? What are some of the benefits that keep you renting/buying server space [...] ?

On dedicated servers I really like the fact that I'm the only user of this specific piece of hardware.
We've seen so many fatal CPU flaws in the last time with eg Spectre/Meltdown and Foreshadow in 2018, or ZombieLoad and RIDL last month.
On a VPS or shared host it would only be a matter of time until some provider misses the embargo, and suddenly all my private data is at risk.

Other than that, once your website grows a bit bigger, or once you decide to host something space-intensive like Nextcloud, dedis can be a lot more cost-effective.
For example I'm currently running an Intel i7-6700 with 64G RAM and 2x4TB storage for 34 bucks a month.
Getting something remotely close to that will usually cost hundreds of dollars on most VPS providers.

 

[Deleted member 65]

My server is my server. None of your server.

 

[Ghost]

My server is my server. None of your server.

Exactly! Having full responsibility and leeway with a server is a massive benefit