IT departments are under pressure as never before.
In 2019, business management looked at the new online business environment and how people were using Social media to interact with them. They were asking IT how they could embrace this new world but at minimum cost. At the same time, Finance asked if the money spent on IT was giving a proper return on Investment. The bottom line, they were looking at basically doing more with less.
All this to the background noise of the daily grind, new malware threats, and requests for remote workers’ access to corporate systems.
Then came 2020 and the pandemic. It has completely changed the ball-game and generated a sea-change in priorities. From being an exercise in cost management, getting more bangs from the IT buck has become a matter of corporate survival. Strategic plans vanish overboard, and new imperatives come to the fore. For many companies, remote working is now the norm.
IT costs are variable, as priorities and business needs change, and management does not like it when IT comes forward with a request for additional funding. A first step is to fix, as far as is possible, the IT budget.
That is where Virtual Private Server (“VPS”) hosting comes in. Simply put, VPS is where an Internet service supplier provides shared infrastructure and the corporate systems operate from there.
IT departments need to consider VPS hosting because it can provide considerable cost savings and a fixed budget cost. For example, a Windows 2019 server instance needs separate physical servers to host a certificate authority and the domain controller. VPS hosting can reduce that to a single physical server running multiple virtual servers.
There are advantages, other than cost, provided by VPS Hosting.
What is VPS and How Does It Work?
As already said, VPS is the implementation of a virtual server environment on a single physical server.
Its most common implementation is the Linux-based platform, KVM, and I’ll use KVM as a typical example. There are others like OpenVZ.
KVM comes with the Linux kernel, and it can be installed with Linux or as an upgrade later. It works on both Intel and AMD processors. You need the mainline Linux kernel at level 2.6.20 or above.
One disadvantage is that KVM is not available for all types of processor. Because it is open-source, there is a flourishing third party development environment. There may be mods available that support other processor types.
Operating System of KVM
KVM supports several operating systems, among which are Windows, BSD, Solaris, and Linux. Therefore, you can have multiple operating systems of different types running in separate virtual servers on the same physical hardware. Each instance manages its virtual resources.
It runs at three levels:
1. The KVM Host, sometimes called a node, is the Linux instance on the physical server that runs the virtual server environment and provides resource management services;
2. The KVM Guests, each with an OS hosting a virtual server; and
3. The KVM Virtual Servers themselves, sometimes called domains.
Each virtual server exists in its own virtual space, managing its own resources. KVM carries out resource management itself, but other implementations may need to beware of resource over allocation. Over allocation happens when the accumulated resource requests from each guest on the host exceed the host’s physical capabilities.
Advantages of VPS Hosting
• Security. Using VPS in conjunction with an encrypted network reduces the risk of pass-through attacks that might otherwise occur with unencrypted shared resource servers.
• Cost. The physical resources needed reduce, leading to reductions in capital and maintenance charges.
• Outsourcing. Outsourcing daily routine operations and management of IT systems infrastructure to a third party VPS Hosting environment like HostSailor frees up staff to more productive tasks, such as systems development.
• No maintenance downtime
• Infrastructure flexibility. Your host takes care of the infrastructure needs of your installation.
Disadvantages of VPS Hosting
• Some real devices cannot run in a virtual environment. You may need to update device drivers or adapter hardware. You might also need to replace equipment, for example, network adapters or physical disks.
• KVM has more significant resource requirements than other implementations of VPS, such as OpenVZ.
• When implementing a VPS yourself:
o You need an already prepared server and device configuration map.
o You need to have already defined how the VM operates.
o You need to be very careful about when and how to manage the transition to the new environment
• A perceived loss of control of outsourced daily operations.
• A single point of failure. If the physical server goes down, al the virtual servers running on it also go down.
For companies looking to fix a portion of their IT spend. VPS hosting is a very viable option. However, it is essential to carry out a requirements survey to ensure that your overall resource requirements are not too much for a VPS installation.