Nowadays technology allows minimizing resource usage while providing equal or even better performance. Project and companies go “Green”, decreasing their emission and electricity consumption rates. Datacenters and hosting providers support those ideas, too – they setup servers with “Green” motherboards and power units and, of course, such measures bring their positive effect. However, it is still a standalone server and it still consumes much energy. And no matter how “green” those standalone servers are – 5 servers are 5 servers and 20 servers are 20 servers.
The fair question is how to make one standalone server provide the productivity of 20 servers. Not that long ago the market was blown with a technology which made it real. This technology is called Virtualization and one of the products it emerged is called a VPS – Virtual Private Server. Such servers provide performance levels equal to ones of a dedicated server and can be hosted in a couple of dozens on a so-called carrier-server – a very powerful standalone server.
Apart from this rather obvious advantage there are four reasons more to purchase such a server.
1. Affordable Pricing
Of course, a cheaper technical solution allows setting a lower price on the product. Since many modern applications and pieces of software have tough system requirements, they leave no chance for their users to use shared hosting. A dedicated server hosting solution on the other hand does not always cover ROI, which makes a purchase of a $200/month dedicated machine simple useless and unprofitable. Fair enough, but what should such users do? Their choice is obvious – a Virtual Private Server, which (depending on the configuration) may cost ten times lower.
2. No Hardware Dependencies
Although there are several virtualization technologies, all of them exclude direct usage of server hardware. Either the hardware is virtualized, or the operating system is – regardless of the method used, in both cases the system addresses to the emulated devices via virtualized drivers. This sets the user free from such issues as hard drive and file system failures and procedures of RAID array rebuild. This means less downtime and more server stability, what is much needed for serious business. An upgrade of the VPS is also a lot easier than of a dedicated server, since RAM, disk space and other quotas are updated virtually – via the VPS management panel.
3. Increased Fail Safety
Apart from being secured from hardware failures, a VPS can also have its system secured. It is realized via snapshot taking method – an advanced method of baking-up which does not include just files, but all system meta-data, devices and drivers information, infrastructure, hierarchy and so on. Such a snapshot also known as VPS image can be used as a roll-back point or for cloning – in case you need to setup another similarly configured server. Additionally, an image of the VPS can be transferred to a another server and started up there with minimal downtime – this is a very important backdoor in case the VPS-carrier fails
4. Load Balancing and Service Distribution
People, who run serious projects, face with an issue of increased resource intensity time to time. In most cases such issues take place due to the enormous activity of one of the server services, which is the most frequently used and addressed to. If this service is web (HTTP) – you are most likely to need an additional lighter front-end server to process a part of http-requests. If it’s about email or MySQL databases – you will need a separate server to work with this service specifically. Talking about dedicated servers this may be rather costly, but if you take a couple of VPSes – their cost may not even exceed the cost of one physical machine.
As far as you can see, a VPS is a rather competitive product if compared to a dedicated server. Taking into account the minimization of failure and downtime risks and the simplicity of its maintenance a VPS may become the most rational hosting solution for a wide range of websites and online projects.
Image Credit: Gem
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