Has anyone ever used a dedicated server for forums?

[Shawn Gossman]

I'm curious if anyone here has used a dedicated server to run their forums.

If so, what was your experience like using the server?

Did you have to manage it or did your host manage it?

 

[secretprojects]

In 17 years my forum has been on shared hosts, dedicated host and VPS. I also work in IT as a Senior Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer.

In my experience, dedicated hosts are no longer necessary. Most companies these days have moved to virtualisation (more recently, containerisation) for almost all workloads, so I would suggest a virtual private server (VPS) is the way to go. You get all the benefits of your own server, but backups are generally easier, and you can generally scale the server up or down very easily as demand changes.

 

[Tracy]

Well...my answer is yes and no.

For a period... I had a dedicated server that I used ProxMox on and created individual VPS's for use of the sites on... got tired of paying $120+ a month for a simple dedicated server) and another $540 a year for a license to run my own VPS's for my sites... in the long term.. it was cheaper to go to a dedicated VPS instead.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I had a dedicated server for a little while and found that my prior VPS handled traffic a lot better than the server did. I would had needed to buy an even more expensive server to be able to cope with the resource load.

I went back to VPS and everything cleared up.

I'll be sticking with VPS for the longhaul.