Sharing is good, right?

Traditional shared hosting has one big advantage. It cuts cost. The problem however,  lies in the sharing.  A single server (in a data centre) is shared by many people for hosting their web sites and email services. This can cause problems for example, if one of the ‘sharers’ gets busy; they can start to hog the server’s resources and suddenly, your emails and your web site start to slow down. If they use weak passwords, your security is compromised as well as their own.

It is a bit like a flat-share:  you move in together because it saves money. You each have your own room to keep your stuff in but you share the bathroom and the lounge. If one flat-sharer has lots of parties, you may find the sharing becomes a bit fraught. If he loses his front door key, you may find your stuff is no longer your stuff.

What can you do? It would be nice to have your own dedicated server (like moving out to your own flat), but it may be more than your budget allows.  Sharing a VPS Cloud platform may be the answer.

"With a Cloud, sharing is different. Your infrastructure is shared but the virtual environment within the Cloud means you can have as much resource as you like – on demand. It is as if you could make your room bigger when you have visitors and smaller when they leave. It costs more than Shared Hosting but it’s a small cost for a big upgrade."

Cost

Shared hosting is usually very cheap: whether you pay £30 a year or £150 a year, hosting a web site is not expensive compared to the cost of telephones, stationery, computers and other business resources.  If your web site is an important part of your business, there is no economic case for continuing with Shared Hosting.

So although a VPS Cloud server may cost around twice the cost of Shared Hosting (rising from say, £8.50 a month to £20 a month at the low end) it still doesn’t cost a lot – probably a lot less than your phone bill.

Especially not when compared to the benefits:

Ease of use

A Cloud Virtual server is like a turbocharged hosting package. The way of using it is the same, the user interface is similar and anybody who has managed a hosting package will be able to manage their hosting on a virtual server that is offered with a control panel.

But it’s much more powerful, with the power and facility you expect from a dedicated server as the resources allocated to you are yours and not shared.

Reliability

All equipment fails at some point. The advantage of a VPS Cloud environment is that when a failure occurs, the VPS Cloud management software reallocates your web site or other applications to another hypervisor and rebuilds it within minutes or even seconds. Downtime doesn’t disappear from our lives but it is now more likely to be caused by software or an ISP failure rather than hardware.

Self-healing environment

All of the critical VPS Cloud resources have self-healing features built in. No human intervention is required.  The cloud platform dynamically configures and reconfigures the resources (processing, memory, disk storage) and provides automatic failover in the event of a failure. Even dedicated servers cannot provide this. If the memory or processor fails, it fails. If the raid array fails, it fails. There is limited failover protection.

Security

The VPS Cloud is not shared, so your web site is unaffected by the activities of others on your server. In shared hosting, your server may be shared with 200 or 300 other users. Just like sharing a flat, you have no idea what your fellow flat mates will do, and who they will let in. So with shared servers, you cannot foresee what poor passwords or weak software will do to your server and who will be let in to your server to the detriment of your own web site. Likewise, you cannot be sure what peaks and overloads will be caused by your neighbours either intentionally or as a result of malicious hacking, thus affecting the performance of your own web site.

Unlimited resources

A VPS Cloud server has resources allocated to it from a vast pool of resources. What you contract to have is always there and always available, much as with a dedicated server. However Cloud servers can also pull in more resources dynamically to make sure that peaks are accommodated.

Management

VPS Cloud servers come with management if you want it, so all you need to do is manage what you put on it. Our management covers the hardware and software we install on your behalf (e.g. email software, cPanel , Microsoft Exchange). We offer both managed and unmanaged servers.

“Not sure which package? Contact our support team to remove the guesswork and configure a VPS Cloud package to your exact needs. You can even operate pay-as-you-go packages, so you only pay for what you use.

For more information, please E-mail our support. Click Here!