With more and more netizens hooking into hosting business and dedicated servers coming cheaper than they used to be a couple of yrs. back, what do you think abt future of dedicated hosting? Are dedicated servers going to become more affordable in coming months? Is free dedicated server any possibility in near future?

I think more and more hosting companies will be using VPS servers in the near future, then upgrading to dedicated servers if they make enough money. Dedicated servers may become a bit cheaper as companies recycle old celerons, but I do not think they will be free. Power and bandwidth really are not cheap.

I think we'll see a turnaround from the Shared -> Reseller -> VPS -> Dedicated paradigm. The new one will be Shared -> Reseller -> VPS. The whole idea of dedicated is bogus. What is required is guaranteed CPU, Memory and Bandwidth. Beyond that, what do you care where the server is or how physical it is?

My opinion, that the prices on dedicated server will continue to decrease. In concrete cases probably even occurrence free dedicated if the bandwich from these servers will be interesting to service provider.

I Disagree. Dedicated Servers will increase with power becoming more expensive and datacenter space cost increases whilst bandwidth becomes cheaper and as you can see several providers have recently increased their pricing.

I don't expect the 'budget providers' to last long in the industry because VPS's are becoming more efficient than entry level dedicated servers.

I agree with Marks on this one. The key here is that VPS requires dedicated servers. Thus the more popular VPS becomes, the more specs will be needed, and the more powerful the VPS packages must become. This in turn means that the dedicated servers used to power VPS must become more spec intensive, and as such become more expensive.

While the average consumer may not continue to utilize dedicated servers over VPS, VPS still requires dedicated servers. As the internet grows, and moves forward with the demand of more power, and more specifications, servers will need to increase in power and specs. As long as the internet is here, the need for servers will never disappear, but instead increase.

It's hard to say imho. You can give arguments for both possibilities: cheaper or more expensive.

Personally I think the difference between low-budget and high-end servers will grow in the future, meaning that low-budget servers will get cheaper and high-end servers will get more expensive.

That's true now. But we move on with the times. You rarely see a Pentium II Dedicated Server and in 10 years from now you will rarely see a Celeron 2.4GHz server because operating systems and control panels will need to consume more memory.

In 10 years from now we will probably see a Pentium 4 3.8GHz HT for $55.00 per Month with 1GB of RAM and 250GB Hard Drive that seems great now but in 10 Years the generation after "Windows Vienna" will take place along with new versions of Linux will need to consume more memory and space so it will run as slow as a Celeron 2.0GHz does at this moment in time.

Power/Electricity is also increasing for data centers who rent out cages as Diesel Generators also don't come cheap and I've been doing some R&D .

The industry only has 2 options up or crash and burn (which is unlikely).

Yes the term "low-buget servers" will have a different meaning, as you have mentioned. In the near future, all single core single processor servers will be called low-budget, even if it's not Celeron and supports Hyper Threading.

Good point sorry :p my bad.

I guess VPS became really popular in last few years. Earlier if someone outgrow a shared host, they would have gone for dedicated. not the case any more.

It is good for us that dedicated servers are getting cheaper day by day, So in future we can expect some reduction in Dedicated server, but for Free dedicated server, i am not seeing any ray of light for this.

Though VPS becoming very popular , i agree with Mark

I agree with this point as there is alway a limit for cost reduction.. and if you see cost for dedicated server are increasing quit a bit.

I agree with allot of you here... I think that their is a bigger future for dedicated servers because it allows people to do their own thing with them and as things become more powerful, thus giving people more power, equals higher demand. All in all, it will be more expensive.