By the RentServers team at Wells Software Consulting LLC · Updated
Recommended setup
| Starting out | One or two VPS instances behind a load balancer |
|---|---|
| Steady traffic | Dedicated servers for app and database tiers |
| Spiky traffic | Cloud instances with autoscaling |
| Data | Database on its own server with replication |
The simplest test: if your instances run near the same size 24/7, you're paying cloud prices for a workload that doesn't need elasticity. Price out a dedicated server with similar cores and memory.
Keep stateless web tiers easy to move, and put the database on hardware with fast NVMe and enough RAM for its working set.