Jamie Balfour

Welcome to my personal website.

Find out more about me, my personal projects, reviews, courses and much more here.

A dedicated server...at last!

A dedicated server...at last!

I've wanted to do this for a long time - a dedicated server! 

For the last five years, I've been running Jambour and all hosted websites using a VPS (virtual private server) with Digital Ocean - an absolutely marvellous company. Well, not any more! As of yesterday, most of my websites have been moved to my own dedicated server, sitting there in my office. 

There are massive benefits to this.

Firstly, cost. It's actually much cheaper for me to run a dedicated server in my house than to rent a virtual part of a server. Our prices were going up so much that we started off paying £7 a month for our virtual private server in 2018 and by the end of 2022, we were paying over £26.

Second, upgradability is much easier, we can provision a second system quickly which can run an updated operating system and be spinning up in less than a second of downtime.

Thirdly, security. Unlike using Digital Ocean, the only way to connect to the server is from within my house, there is absolutely no other way to do this.

Fourthly, performance is much higher. A dedicated system can have whatever performance you want. We've got a 12-core system as opposed to a 4-virtual core system. 

Fifthly, storage space. We have a whopping 256GB and 2TB of additional space available as opposed to 50GB. 

Finally, ownership. I now physically own the server and can shut it down or turn it on whenever I need to. 

Comments
Powered by DASH 2.0