As far as dedicated servers are concerned, the concept is extremely simple: you pay for a server and it’s yours. You pay the same amount each month regardless of how many resources you use.

Nowadays, “only pay for what you use” is an approach which is as controversial as it is innovative. Cloud hosting is all about usage-based billing. In other words, if you’ve used more server resources today than yesterday, you’ll pay more today. An eloquent example is represented by websites which are subject to the digg effect every once in a while. Let’s assume that your website receives 1,000 uniques per day but that it makes it to the digg frontpage once or twice per month. The result: a huge spike of traffic which takes its toll on the server.

The owner of such a website has a difficult decision to make: normally, a Virtual Private Server or even shared hosting is enough if you’re only receiving 1,000 visitors daily. On the other hand, you can get in trouble if your websites receives sudden spikes of traffic.

Should you stick with your current plan and pay less? You could do that but what if your server goes down the minute you start receiving a lot of traffic from Digg? Would you be willing to let tens of thousands of visitors land on a page which doesn’t load and never come back?

How much is that traffic worth to you? Should you upgrade to a dedicated server? Wouldn’t you be overpaying if you go dedicated just because you receive more traffic a few days per month?