Most Important Dedicated Server Features

I've been in the hosting industry many years and it has been my experience that the purchasers of dedicated servers are usually more reactive than they are proactive. Although the services required to be proactive cost more, the headache, upset clients and lost revenue will be more costly in the end.

Which services should you use to be proactive? 

DDoS Protection

No one likes latency or, if the attack is strong enough, downtime. Being as client-centered as we are here at Limestone Networks, we hate it even more because we want only what is best for our clients. The fact is DDoS attacks are becoming more abundant and costly to mitigate. Looking for a way to help our clients stay online and running smoothly, we developed tiers for our DDoS Protection that would allow us to provide enterprise protection options. It is extremely common for me to see tickets from upset clients because their server is offline and their customers are complaining, however they haven't added DDoS protection. This is why I would say this is the #1 most important dedicated server feature that is overlooked.  

RAID Hard Drive Redundancy

Hardware failure happens. We do everything in our power to keep it from happening to our clients in several ways: pulling hard drives from circulation that are getting old, testing every hard drive after each cancellation, and testing again when we provision a server. No matter what we do, hardware failure will still happen. If you don't have RAID setup for redundancy you can lose your data. This is another sore point for our Support team. Delivering the bad news of a hard drive failure to a person that doesn't have RAID is extremely difficult. Hardware RAID allows the technician to simply replace the disk that has failed and bring your server back on immediately. Your original hard drive will then re-clone to the new drive while your server is online and serving your employees or customers.

Server Management

Some companies are not large enough to hire an IT staff to manage their server. Our unmanaged support team assists clients within 10 minutes of opening a ticket with matters such as operating system reloads, hardware issues, network issues, and power issues. However, if you're needing work done within your operating system like spam troubleshooting, software installation, virtual machine maintenance, and more then you need management. In my years of running Support departments in the hosting industry I've seen some experienced server administrators utilize our server management services simply so that they can focus on other things that are more important to them. For larger companies, our management team acts like an extension of their internal Information Technology department-- performing routine maintenance and management tasks upon request.

So to sum it up, by adding these three services to your dedicated server hosting you are making steps to be proactive and provide the most stable service possible for your user-base or customers. DDoS Protection, RAID hard drive redundancy and Server Management.