Dedicated Hosting DDR2 & DDR3 Difference
 

Hey all,

I am considering moving one of my dedicated servers to another company and one of the plans I can see only has a difference with the Memory of DDR2 to DDR3... is there really much of a difference in performance?

Also - anyone that knows any good dedicated hosting companies - let me know :)

For hosting, dedicated or otherwise I would go with http://www.dedico.com

Worthelsss spam.


Anyway to the point. DDR2 came around 3 years ago and was more widely adapated about a year ago. DDR2 max's its bus speed at 1266.. Where DDR3.. is the latest and greatest thing and handles all the newer/higher/faster bus speeds and the new CPU processors.

Ultimately depending on the configuration of the server the memory actually clocks down in speed. in other words if you have lots of smaller chips in the system y our bus speed slow down.

Realistically your system should be using a newer CPU on the ddr3.. pretty sure older cpus wont work with ddr3 so if thats the only difference your seeing.. someone might be lying to you on the cpu.. or just claiming its 4 cores.. but it could be a slew of difference, i3, i5, 3300 series 3400 series 5400 series 5500 series or 5600 series.

Zack more a less summed it up for you.

You will typically see DDR3 offered on some of the newer servers on the market. Will it make a 'huge difference'? That really comes down to the type of applications you are running. On a tube site, you will definitely see a noticeable difference. On a bunch of word press blogs? Not so much.

buy only servers with new(er) hardware...

I still admire server providers that are still selling Intel Pentium D @ 2 GHz
I mean WTF... that hardware is years old...

Eh, more/less anything that has IO between the memory and CPU which rides the bus is affected... which is pretty much everything. everything should be noticeably quicker. better bus speeds = faster, when your chugging lots of data and yes wordpress is a whore with databases you should see an improvement.

It depends on your hosting market.

There are many people who upgrade from a VPS to a lower end dedicated. There are a number of niche markets in hosting. Not everyone needs the latest and greatest based on their actual NEEDS. People will go from a PROMO, to a premium to a dedicated. But they do not have the budget for a $200 Quad, nor need it.

:2 cents:

Make sure to take a look at NatNet, they are soo helpful and will take care of you.

In addition to our quadcore and dual quadcore boxes, we have several atom boxes and p4's -- not for production, but for simple development servers, internal rsync mirrors on pnets, remote backups, etc. They serve a purpose at a reasonable cost. They key, as you said, is identifying your specific needs and understanding the limitations of your choice of servers. We certainly do not need a dual 5620 box and 16GB of DDR3 as a dedicated rsync storage server.

bump for NATNET

WOW thanks guys I really appreciate all your feedback :D

Okay say a

Intel Xeon 3470 (Quad Core)
8 GB DDR3 Memory
2 X 500 GB Hard Drives
10 TB Bandwidth
9 Dedicated IPs


I have noticed a lot of companies offering something similar to this - will the CPU really utilize the DDR3 ? Or is this hardware considered old?

Also another noob question.

I am suspecting that maybe mysql needs to be tweaked in a better way. I have shopping carts running and one with 800 000 products on it. The thing is that someone told me its the server that needs to be faster.

Is there is testing I can do on both to see what needs to be upgraded?

The X3470 is new'ish, its not old.

Based on your last post, it sounds like you need to hire a good system administrator or add management to your server.

you said that about webair when they were in your sig so shut the fuck up and fuck off.

you need a host with a brain.

Bottom line, DDR2 is old, and if they're using DDR2, they're probably using other old crap. So they're likely overcharging you for basically renting a system that is worth maybe a few hundred if you bought it and owned it yourself.

All depends on what you are doing with the server, you dont always need a $200+/month server.

One other tip... make sure you determine if your host is using desktop grade hardware or server grade hardware. Sounds crazy, but you'd be surprised how many discount hosts use desktop grade hardware, which is generally cheaper than quality server grade hardware.

Also dont expect server-grade hardware if you try and shop for cheap cheap cheap. You get what you pay for.
Hosting is the backbone of your business, spend $50-$100 more to get something reliable. After all, what is $50-$100 for something so important to keeping your business online and making you money?

Wow thank you for your excellent replies - really has helped clear up a few things :)

Hello,

Your question cannot really be answered based upon the information you have provided.

Yes, DDR3 is newer technology and will run at higher speeds and will mostly come with new cpu's. However, do you really need all this power your listing above.

How much bandwidth are you doing? How much traffic are you generating? Is your current hardware causing your sites to run slow?

The reasons I bring this up is because a lot of people who shop around for hosting companys just assume they need super powerful servers and pay the extra money for them when there is no need for you to pay more money in most cases.

A lot of times when it comes to hardware any middle range processor and 2-4 gigs of ram will be more then enough to do whatever it is you need to do. What it really comes down to with hardware is hard drives, raid types so forth.

In even more detail, your hardware could be more then enough but because of a poorly written script or hard drives not running the way they are supposed to be can cause high cpu loads, and extremely slow websites.


Anyways I could go on forever but if you would like to contact me and tell me what exactly your looking to do I can easily inform you what you really need vs what you might just be willing to pay extra for. I am not trying to get you to come host with us but if you decide to I am not going to turn you away either LOL.

My info is in my sig.

Why not just go with a cloud server? You can scale your resources up and down at any time:

http://www.webair.com/webhosting-cloud-servers.html

Unlike a traditional VPS (virtual private server), the WEBAIR DEDICATED CLOUD SERVER SOLUTIONS offer truly dedicated and protected resources while eliminating all single points of failure. Additionally, you have the ability for your CPU allocation to burst when there are free CPU cycles on the host machine. So often you end up with far more CPU allocation than what you are paying for!

In a nutshell, pay only for what you use at any given time, & get more redundancy and speed than you would on a traditional dedicated server. :thumbsup:thumbsup

If you are stuck on dedicated : http://www.webair.com/webhosting-dedicated.html

Contact me, as wel have a couple of specials going on for quad core atm.

In a web server, DDR2 and DDR3 are indistinguishable.


DDR2 3200-8533 MB/s
DDR3 6400-17066 MB/s

Hard drive ~ 50 MB/s
gigabit network 100 MB/s

Although some DDR3 is "faster' than DDR2, both are about 60-100 times faster than a hard
drive, so unless you have quite a few hard drives the RAM speed doesn't matter at all.

A web server basically takes bytes from hard drives and sends it to the network card, so what
matters is the speed of the drive array and the network card. The CPU and RAM speed don't
matter a bit for a web server. If you have a lot of ram the most frequently accessed files can
be cached in memory and not read from the drive, but that's about how many MBs of RAM you
have, not it's speed.

Most servers today also have a small database. A MySQL database is also generally limited
by disk access time. Normally, only a badly broken PHP script would thrash the database
so that memory speed could possibly start to matter.

Does either company know that the hell they are doing? I hate to say it, but most hosting
companies don't employ qualified people, because webmasters don't know to look for that.
Knowledgeable sysadmins will make a MUCH bigger difference than memory speed.
What about their reputation for integrity or lack of it? That could make a huge difference,
not just in whether or not they screw you over directly, but indirectly too, such as whether
or not your mail is blocked because they allow other customers to send spam. That again
is something that will likely make a real difference in time, whereas RAM speed won't matter.

he has an 800,000 item db that is probably loading a direct query on a single server. Reality is he should choose an option that just scales that out, either like Webair said with a cloud or a server cluster. Worry about your php your queries and your cache servers before worrying about your memory speed.

Hi! I have a dedicated server setup that is very similar to this on special. Hit me up and we can discuss specifics:)

tondab at nakedhosting dot com or ICQ 61462417