Why choose VPS hosting?

Virtual Private Servers not only fill a gap between shared web hosting and traditional dedicated servers from a price perspective, they also offer a new more flexible approach to hosting applications that makes efficient use of the technology available today.

Efficient use of hardware

Personal computers have become increasingly powerful over the years and the things that we do with them has increased - starting from simple word processing 10 years to ago to video editing, music, video conferencing, interactive 3d games and more that we see today. The same performance gains exist in servers however the demands placed on them hasn't kept up with the capability of the hardware. Most server hardware today is in-efficiently utilised. Virtualisation provides and answer to this, by combining the requirements of multiple machines on the the one host. Virtual servers are significantly more energy efficient which is both good for the environment and reduces underlying costs.

Lower prices for entry level systems

The need to provision a physical box in a data centre and provide it with power under the dedicated server model limits how cheap the service can ever be. With Virtual servers the efficiency gains in provisioning, space and power usage allow us to offer entry level services at significantly cheaper prices.

Performance on demand

In a traditional server when additional memory, cpu or storage capacity are required physical changes must be made to the hardware which is time consuming and in many cases requires a full migration of the application including operating system reinstallation.

In a virtual server environment, additional memory, cpu and storage can be added on the fly with no configuration changes to the local host, no physical hardware changes and significantly shorter service disruptions. Upgrades can be performed at significantly shorter notice as a result.

Reduced migration costs

Service migration from one physical server to the next is an inherently time consuming process. It most often requires that a second system be built and configured with absolute confidence that the old and the new system are the same. This is followed by a synchronisation and cutover process.

The use of virtualisation in many cases avoids the need to perform hardware migrations and hence provides significant cost reductions.

The current high migration costs typically dictate that enough hardware be installed to cover the projected demand for a 12 month period on initial deployment. With easier migration we can now only deploy the required resources at the time and incrementally increase as the load on the application dictates.

Rapid deployment of services

By remove the need to be physically configure hardware for new services, virtual servers allow rapid template based installation of new services. New servers can be brought up in hours rather than days or weeks.