You may have heard rumors that virtualization, cloud hosting, VPS services, and other “virtual” solutions are more expensive, unreliable, slower, have a complex migration, and are difficult to manage. However, all of these could be far from the truth. What is certain is that with virtualization you will be spending more time and energy on your business and improving your offerings than on worrying about datacenter issues and downtime.
Virtualization is a loosely used term for too many offerings and solutions that today’s web hosting companies are trying to sell you. What is virtualization? At the most fundamental level, virtualization is the ability to run one environment, such as an operating system, inside of another environment (such as an operating system). Imagine running Windows Vista inside of Windows 7 or running multiple instances of Linux inside of Windows (or any other operating system). Virtualization simply lets you allocate different amounts of resources and privileges to other parts of the physical server.
You may be asking yourself how this is any different from the classic shared hosting environments you are used to renting from GoDaddy, 1and1, and others. All of these services are “shared” in nature, but you aren’t actually renting a piece of the entire server that your website is on, only some web space to upload your files over FTP and to run your website through their web server.
Which sort of virtualization is right for your needs? If you have a small website with a few hits, then you should continue paying your webhost $10/month or less for your FTP space and web server access. But what if you have something more complex such an open-source forum, a small MySQL database, some custom PHP content, and your website? Again, it depends on how much traffic you get. If you receive very little traffic, shared hosting may still be your solution. By now you must be wondering why you’d ever need anything besides shared hosting for $10/month.
The answer is you probably don’t and the salesman on the other end of the phone is trying to sell you services that are too powerful for your needs. What if you really have a need for serious web hosting services? It’s clear that there are plenty of companies that have a requirement for better computing resources, so what sorts of requirements do you need to justify higher costs and a more sophisticated hosting environment?
Part 1 – Ownership:
When you own your own servers, much like you own your car, your sense of ownership may provide you with a false feeling of security. It’s true that by owning your servers you feel like no one can access or tamper with them, but what about the downsides? Hard drive failures, motherboard failures, network card failures, power supply failures, etc. In addition to your responsibility of maintaining the hardware, you will probably also need to purchase remote IP KVM’s or computers with remote access integrated into the motherboard which carry a higher price tag, remote power rebooters so you don’t have to painfully wait for datacenter technicians to restart your servers, and shipping spare parts when they are needed. With a virtual solution all of these problems do not exist. In a virtual environment, you can experiment and customize your server as much as you want, break it, and just start a new virtual instance at any time without worrying about anything. (more…)
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