Virtual Private Servers – Advantages and Drawbacks
In order to keep your website or your virtual private network up and running smoothly, it is essential to have a reliable IT infrastructure that hosts it. The infrastructure should consist of robust servers that have the capacity to handle multiple users without slowing down or crashing. These servers need to have good storage as well as processing capacity – this includes a good amount of RAM and the latest processors hardened for server environment.
Large projects with a large group of concurrent users will need a dedicated hosting server, which would live up to the required configuration. Quite a few companies still spend a large amount of money toward managing the servers in an in-house data centre. In these cases, the IT team has to deploy additional dedicated resources to ensure total uptime and maintenance of the server infrastructure.
To avoid this scenario, a solution that many companies are taking up to save themselves from the upfront costs of the traditional model, is the cloud based virtual servers.
What is a Virtual Private Server?
Virtual Private Servers are also known as virtual dedicated servers. This is because a virtualised environment that needs to perform specific tasks is committed exclusively to an organisation, although the physical location of the infrastructure may differ. Therefore, virtual is the actual physical configuration or topology of the network.
What are the advantages of Virtual Private Servers?
Apart from a simple pay-as-per-use model, the Virtual Private Server entails no upfront capital costs to the organisation. At any given point in time with a bare minimum advance notice, the company just needs to inform its cloud service provider of the amount of storage space / processing which is needed for its functioning.
As an example, consider the operations of an e-commerce website, whose requirements increase four-fold on Christmas season sales. If the site were to follow traditional ways of managing its infrastructure, it would need to procure resources to match the peak load – in other words – four times the cost and idle capacity for the rest of the months.
Today, an e-commerce site can use the services of a cloud based virtual private server, which, in turn, can be scaled up or down in no time. The monthly billing of the server would be purely based on usage, which would be far less than the earlier situation.
Points to look out for while buying Virtual Private Servers
One of the perceived drawbacks of a Virtual Private Server is that the complete hosting of business information is done outside the physical premises of the organisation. Uptime and confidentiality of the data are prime concerns for companies while they consider the switch from traditional self-hosted models to a cloud based virtual private server model.
Cloud based services over a period have evolved as a specialised business and a service delivery model. With these evolutions, service providers now bring in place all the necessary non-disclosure agreements and arrangements to manage confidentiality of data. System uptime is taken care of by stringent Service Level Agreements signed with the service provider.
With a fine combination of technology and legal arrangements, cloud based services including virtual private servers, have not just become absolutely safe and reliable, they are now turning into a norm across the IT landscape of many businesses.
All of our recommended VPS providers offer exceptional reliability, speed and security at very competitive prices. Please contact us for help and advice on choosing the right provider for your needs.
