This question troubles a lot of people because it deals with the nuts and bolts of your network operations and also demands investing a hefty amount of money.
It is true that servers cost a lot. The question is if they cost more than the downtime caused by an aging server. Certainly not. Imagine the loss of precious data and potentially the loss of clients when the server goes down repeatedly despite multiple troubleshooting attempts. We are having a hard time imagining such a dreadful situation and surely you are too.

Therefore, it’s not a good idea to stick with a slow, old server device that is close to its retirement when you can replace, or precisely speaking “re-invest”, in a brand-new server that will go as fast as a Ferrari. This investment is not only worth your money, but it also has the potential to boost your income. With modern servers, you can rest assured you will have maximum uptime as well as highly-optimized overall performance.

So how do you know exactly when to upgrade to a new server? The answer is that the best time to do it is when you experiencing any one or more of the following issues:

1.   Warranty Expiration

There is a reason why this is number one on our list. The warranties for older servers will ultimately expire and after that your server will start acting up. In order to keep downtime issues at bay, you might want to replace your server ahead of its warranty expiration date.

Server warranty typically lasts 3 years and after that manufacturers no longer take care of your hardware. So consider this the “retirement date” for your server.

2.   Excessive Maintenance Needs

Aging servers need continuous maintenance to maintain regular performance. This excessive need to maintain your server hardware will lead to deteriorating its capability rather than improving it. Eventually, you will be spending a lot of money just on maintenance.

In other words, you can’t put an old horse in a race even when you’re feeding it well.

3.   Growing Business Demands

Whether it is the size of your organization that is increasing or your website is receiving more traffic than ever, it is important that your server remains capable of fulfilling the growing demands. If your server bandwidth reaches a maximum of 70% or often runs low on drive space, your server performance will decline.

However, you can resolve this issue by the use of virtual machines. This is especially true if you have a need for multiple servers to meet growing business needs. You can buy just one good quality server and run virtual machines off it.

4. Outdated Software

If your server is incapable of supporting recent OS and applications, you should immediately upgrade. When you upgrade on software, it is a good time to steadily upgrade hardware as well. Modern servers also provide faster remote access which allow you to efficiently run programs that are installed on other computers or servers.

Conclusion

The acquisition of new servers means that your entire IT and network operations will receive a massive performance boost. Even though this may be a costly undertaking, your organization will be able to keep up with the technology with improved efficiency, faster speed, zero downtime, and minimal infrastructure maintenance among lots of other long-term benefits.

January 9, 2020
Steven Nuhn