Moving to a dedicated server: which specs actually matter?

A few non-spec things worth asking before you sign: - bandwidth: what port speed, and is traffic metered or unmetered. overage charges can be ugly - data center location, close to your audience - out-of-band access (IPMI / KVM console). when the box won't boot after a bad update, that's how you get in without opening a ticket and waiting That last one has saved me more than any CPU upgrade.

For most web workloads it's RAM and disk before cores. Get NVMe SSDs, not spinning drives, and enough RAM that the database fits in memory with room to spare. That alone fixes most "slow site" problems people move servers for. CPU: if it's PHP (WordPress, Magento etc), single-core speed matters more than core count, since each request mostly runs on one core. Lots of slow cores look great on a spec sheet and feel worse. The stuff people forget: two drives in RAID 1 so one dying doesn't take you down, a real off-server backup (RAID isn't a backup), and whether it's managed or not. Unmanaged means you're the one patching it and getting up at 2am when MySQL falls over. What are you running on it?