How To Measure The Performance Of Your Dedicated Server
A dedicated server is a potent solution permitting the realization of the most ambitious web projects. However, as a dynamic system that is regularly updated and complemented. For its performance to always remain optimal, it needs to be monitored, so you can know whether it could perform better and how you can optimize your dedicated hosting server. To figure this out we are going to dedicate the article today.
The Aspects of Dedicated Server Performance and How to Measure Them
Monitoring Uptime And Downtime:
Uptime is an essential parameter of a server that functions well. It’s natural that when visiting your website, it is supposed to be up. Otherwise, your potential customer can doubt the very existence of your company and look for your competitors.
Thus, ensuring the maximum uptime is an essential prerogative of your server management. However, due to various software or hardware level issues, your server can experience occasional downtimes, resulting in eventual damage to your business. In case of downtime, the best decision is to contact the support team of the provider and figure out together what was wrong.
To be always aware of whether your dedicated server is up, you can use such tools as Pingdom or Uptime Robot. These utilities will always notify you every time there is a downtime on the server, allowing you to take proactive measures as soon as possible.
Load Time:
The load time refers to the speed at which the site’s pages load. This is another crucial parameter since it has a direct effect on the satisfaction of your customers. Although slow load speed won’t cause your customers to leave your website immediately, pages loading slowly will have an irritating effect that slowly accumulates and makes your visitors like your website less diminishing their chances to visit your resource one more time.
Furthermore, load time is one of the essential parameters taken into account when ranking your website in search engine results. In case it exceeds three seconds, your website will be significantly ranked down.
Load time is influenced by a variety of factors, including how well your website is written, whether you have sufficient resources, whether the content on your website is optimized, and so on. If it takes too long for your pages to load, you’d better figure out how to improve the situation as soon as possible.
In this case, you can use such tools as GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights. These tools will provide you with details insights into your load speed accompanied by suggestions on how to improve it.
Response Time:
Another parameter that affects how fast your website works is the response time. Response time refers to the time that your server needs to respond to a request of a user. Like in the case of load time, a long response time will make the experience of your site visitors rather uncomfortable and frustrating, resulting in their overall dissatisfaction.
To measure your response time, you can use such tools as Ping or Traceroute. These will provide you with detailed information on how fast your server responds and help you identify, what are the weak spots of your server infrastructure and what can be improved.
Server Resource Usage:
The performance of your dedicated server relies in the first place on the resources it has at its disposal. For your website and all of its components to work properly, the dedicated server has to offer sufficient amounts of storage space, CPU, and RAM. In case the website is running short of resources, its performance will decrease and you’ll have no other choice than to optimize it or migrate it to a more potent machine.
To figure out, whether performance issues of your website are caused by a lack of resources and what you can do about it, you can use such tools as Top (for Linux-based servers) or Task Manager (for Windows-based servers).
Security:
The aspect of server security cannot be overestimated. The safety of your data, the information of your customers, as well as your reputation, are determined by how well the security of your server is managed. Security is contributed to by various elements, which include malware protection, the firewall, whether all updates are installed, and others.
To check the current state of the security of your system and to learn about the measures that can be taken, you can use such tools as Nessus or OpenVAS, which can scan your server for vulnerabilities and provide you with detailed reports.
Conclusion:
The performance of your dedicated server is a determining factor for the success of your website. To keep it fit, however, you have to perform regular checks to see whether all of its aspects are optimized and whether there is something to be done. We hope that this guide was helpful, thank you for your time!