Cloud / Dedicated sever suitability to types of websites

  • Hi all, I am choosing a new host for our wordpress site. Currently we get on average 5-7 seconds loading time on gtmetrix.com, that’ too slow for us.
    and so I’m considering the differences between a cloud service and a dedicated server – I know there are many, but specifically- assuming everything else is equal, and that we can spend the same budget on a cloud server, and a dedicated server, and supposing the website has these attributes:

    1) Highly spiky traffic (most of the daily traffic comes within a short window of a few hours every day)- about 400k pageviews per month.

    2) Our content is mostly very lean – mostly text posts and a few images; no heavy duty media streaming or big files. Therefore I suspect that a lot of the overhead must be caused by server side scripts that the website is too laden with – wordpress plugins, widgets and CSS code in the theme.

    3) Our traffic sources are dispersed globally, but about 80-90% come from The US, specifically east and west coasts.

    ok here is the question…. (finally!) supposing the traffic is lean and a script heavy site, what would be better in principle, a cloud based configuration or a dedicated, superfast central server?

    I would guess ( but its just a guess) that cloud would be less suitable – as it would be better for the opposite scenario, where the site is lean on scripts but heavy on content.

    I just don’t know exactly how it would play out – I assume:

    1) Scripting performance: Cloud means that each virtual server is on average weaker than what the same budget would buy me in a dedicated host; and that would be the decisive difference to running the scripts, which the dedicated server would do better;

    2) Bandwidth performance: Assuming the average bandwidth throughput a global user will see with the dedicated serve is of slower performance than with cloud (since on average the content would be further away from the source – which has only one place) while cloud would multiply the source and bring localized virtual serves closer to each average user…

    Is this rough formula true? Lean content + heavy scripting + global user dispersion = dedicated server wins out; Heavy content + light scripting + global user dispersion = cloud wins out.

    I know a dedicated server can still have a CDN service added to it, but that’s just for data.. not for scripts. I understand that cloud has a great advantage in the possibility of pay by use hourly model; but beyond that, my main focus is to first arrive at what is bette for performance for us, assuming also growth for the future.

    Thanks for any advice!! good day…

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  • Based on my (bad) VPS experience a few years back, with a WordPress site with Pages with huge processing demands, I learned that the place to start before making any decisions on Hosting Resources is: Caching.

    WordPress Caching comes in many flavours, but can really reduce the Processor (CPU) usage for a given amount of traffic. The tradeoff is generally that Memory (RAM) and/or Disk I/O usage can increase significantly, though reducing the time it takes to deliver each page can compensate for the extra RAM.

    With my limited experience, I would say that RAM is the #1 hardware issue in your case as it was in mine. But Caching is the place to start.

    Hopefully others will have more to add.

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