Finding a hosting environment which meets the requirement with respect to the technology support, bandwidth, CPU, RAM and storage space is generally straight forward. However, there are some not so obvious factors which one learns only with experience. These factors could lead to painful real-life problems, and are seldom appreciated till they actually hit.
Following are some of the important but generally overlooked considerations.
1. Type of hard drives
Using cheap hard drives may appear tempting from cost perspective but could be disastrous in the long run. Crashing, corruption and burning of hard disks are definite possibilities if unreliable disks are used. Avoid using SATA drives and use SCSI drives instead.
Pay more attention to disk speed rather than CPU speed. Typically processors are standard and their performance does not vary significantly. Biggest bottleneck in the performance of a server is disk IO. This is especially true for database servers. For databases choose the fastest disk and controller solution.
2. Robustness of controller
Controller malfunctioning could corrupt all the disks under it. Controller malfunction can occur when a server is not properly tested. Before accepting the server, ensure that it has been completely tested. Dell server's BIOS have test suites for testing the controller, CPU, disks, etc. In addition, BurnInTest from www.passmark.com can be used to test endurance of the server under high disk and CPU load.
3. Type of RAID
Although not very common, RAID malfunctioning can corrupt the disk data. Hardware based RAID solutions are generally more reliable than software based RAID solutions. Windows Server has an inbuilt RAID but critical applications and data should not rely on it. If possible, take a server with hardware RAID controller.
RAID means multiple hard disks clubbed together as a single logical disk. E.g. RAID 1 takes two physical disks and represents them as one single disk to the OS. Consequently, all the write operations are performed on both the disks simultaneously. If one of the disks fails, the other takes over and continues the operation seamlessly. RAID 1 is suitable for web servers.
RAID 5 is faster than RAID 1 and is better for database servers. RAID 5 is more expensive as it requires a minimum of 3 disks. In case of a disk malfunction, the controller regenerates the lost data of the affected disk from other disks.
4. Using Firewall, file sharing and ports
Most hosting vendors provide Firewall but if it malfunctions, it could expose the web server. As a safeguard, it would be better to keep Windows Firewall activated on the external network card which is connected to the hardware Firewall. Windows Firewall is not a heavy resource consumer and has negligible effect on the performance.
File sharing and NetBIOS protocol should be disabled on the external network card. Ensure that all unused ports are not left open.