Virtualization and cloud computing gives businesses a variety of ways to meet their current capacity, planned growth, and budget.
As the world of hosting gets more complex, so do the choices.
Knowing more about hosting options helps businesses to match the right hosting plan with their goals and budget:
In-House Servers and Hosting (Private, Shared, VPS)
Using in-house servers is the traditional computing model where a company maintains all of its resources. Application servers, storage, and network servers all reside in and are maintained by the company. This model gives companies the ultimate control of their resources. Along with that control comes the responsibility to monitor, maintain, upgrade and tune the resources as needed.
This is usually the most expensive option since the company must also maintain all of the infrastructures to support the computing environment such as power, cooling, backup, and recovery. This is all overhead that hosting companies take on when using their services.
Private hosting means you get your own application server, storage space, and perhaps your own network server. You don’t share space or capacity with anyone else. It’s there for you to use when you need it. For private hosting to be cost-effective, you need to match what you get with what you need so there isn’t a lot of capacity just sitting idle.
Shared hosting is an option where a company shares all resources with other companies. Shared hosting is the least expensive option. The hosting company manages all of the resources and distributes them to their users based on their ability to balance the application and network activity. You get what they give you. Performance can vary from day to day, even hour to hour, depending on what other companies are located on the same servers as you and what they are doing.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) functions as a middle ground between private and shared hosting. With VPS, your company gets a dedicated slice of capacity from the application, storage, and network servers. You get dedicated resources as with the private hosting, but your slices will be on machines that you share with other company slices, as PC World reports.
How companies look at computing resources is changing, according to All Things Digital. Once, a large room full of machines defined a company’s computing strength. Some companies now don’t maintain a single computer on the premises. The choice of in-house computing versus service is based on what the company does and how they view its resources.
Choosing In-House or VPS Hosting
More hosting companies are offering VPS, so there are even more hosting companies to select from, as noted by LifeHacker. There are common reasons to choose VPS that apply to all companies you may research. There are also still some good reasons to maintain your in-house resources.
A company that uses primarily off-the-shelf or cloud-based applications is a good candidate for VPS hosting. Companies that have many custom applications, especially those that interface with customized equipment, need to rely on in-house computing. A company that does scientific measurements and data acquisition need an in-house solution.
For a company with low to moderate traffic to its Website (less than 2 thousand page visits daily) that still needs good performance without a high cost, VPS is an option. A medical practice that has many educational videos on its site that patients can review is one example of this.
Any company that deals with special security or contract requirements may have to rely on in-house systems. For instance, some government contracts, financial and pharmaceutical projects may stipulate that private, secure equipment be used. Even in these cases, portions of the work may be appropriate for VPS.
Small startups are good candidates for VPS. It takes the burden of maintaining equipment from them but creates an environment for them that feels like their own. Once the company reaches stable operations, management can determine if VPS will continue to meet its needs.
Not an All-or-None Decision
The nice thing about virtualization is that it doesn’t need to be the only solution. A company can maintain a portion of its resources in-house while relying on a hosting solution for the rest. For instance, an electronic engineering company could have testing platforms that interface with in-house servers, yet perform all of its CRM activities online within the VPS solution.
Technology has changed which gives companies many new choices. The most successful businesses identify their needs then mix-and-match in-house, VPS, and other hosting options to meet their goals.
