Dedicated Servers Checklist

How to select dedicated servers? And which servers are affordable? Here is your checklist.

Advantages

Servers of your own allow for far better performance then virtual private servers.
Unlike a virtual private server, a server of your own allows you to install your own hardware
Like a virtual private server, you have complete privacy, guaranteed CPU resources, network bandwidth a large disk storage space, and ability to install your own web applications.

Higher maintenance costs (E.g. it took me lots of time to administer the spam filtration mechanism on my virtual server). Good control panels may lower this cost, but you will still need to have technical knowledge. It's much simpler to have a shared hosting solution.
Scalability issues (When your web traffic becomes high, you will have to find another solution. Switching cost may be high).
Sites with lots of traffic may need more then one server (or a load balancing solution).
Shared hosting is more standard, hence there is a higher number of applications optimized for shared hosting. Virtual private server hosting solutions tend to be vendor-specific.
The price of a dedicated server is higher then the price of a virtual private server but not high as it was used to. Dedicated hosting is becoming cheaper each day. Several months ago, I've found a dedicated linux server for 50$/month.

Consider dedicated hosting if you need high perfomance of special application needs.
Plan to migrate later, when traffic grows even more.