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Web Hosting Services: The Virtualization Revolution

To purchase, install, maintain and secure a state-of-the-art web server is associated with enormous costs. Web hosting pioneers first marketed their “server farms” for companies to simply rent space on remote servers, handling all the security and maintenance needs on behalf of their customers. However, smaller businesses didn’t need all the bandwidth and computing power available in a single computer, so the ability to rent only the amount they need on a shared server became an attractive proposition.

Ten years ago, hosting services looked to improve the shared services for the rising number of smaller businesses making use of the Internet. Since shared hosting presented too many security risks and bandwidth restrictions to be attractive to serious web developers, they adopted the latest virtualization technology from Linux developers of the Open Source movement. Virtualization systems blurred the line between the dedicated server and shared server by making a single server behave as if it were many individual servers. This way, users could “virtually” have their own private server, along with greater security and bandwidth flexibility.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

Shared hosting service customers access their servers files among other customers, which inherently raises security concerns. The less risky Virtual Private Servers provide private access and file storage, creating the same user experience of a dedicated server, but at significantly less cost. Virtual Private Servers are the ideal solution for web developers, ecommerce sites and other small to medium sized businesses who don’t want a dedicated server, but find shared hosting too restrictive or not powerful enough.

Each VPS runs on its own operating system, and hosting services generally include a selection of applications for online web development and testing, virtual server clustering, etc, and can allow installation of some custom applications. But users are limited to a set amount of disk space, and software restrictions are placed to prevent incompatibility with the virtualized environment. If an application in one VPS crashes, it may impact others residing on the same computer.

The Next Step in Virtualization: Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS)

The VDS is the next step in evolution of the VPS. Like VPS on steroids, it provides users with their own a private IP address, increased security, more consistent bandwidth, more reliability and better crash protection. Because it operates within a fully isolated software environment, other accounts cannot slow down the other VDSs that share the same server with excessive CPU and bandwidth usage.

The VDS behaves more like a dedicated server by dividing one computer into more than 50 private server networks, each running an independent operating system with its own dedicated disk space. Just like a dedicated server, each VDS has an independent operating system, root access, web/mail servers, and unique web IP address. This way, application problems, security flaws and usage in one VDS, can not effect the other VDSs on the shared server computer.

The Future of Virtualization

As server hardware continues to evolve along with how we use the Internet, virtualization technology will undoubtedly continue to find new ways to tap their full potential. We can look forward to more bandwidth and capabilities beyond what we can imagine today, as we live and work in an increasingly virtual world!

By Mimi O’Connor, a contributing author for Silicon Valley Web Hosting and other technology publications