IT departments are always under pressure. 2020 has given another turn to the screw.
In 2019, business management was looking at the growth of e-commerce and Social Media as the point of contact. They were asking IT to plan to embrace this new world but at minimum cost.
All this to the background noise of the daily grind, new malware threats, and requests for remote workers’ access to corporate systems.
2020 turned these development strategies into survival strategies. IT strategies moved from being an exercise in cost management to a tool of corporate survival. New strategic plans are the baseline, and new priorities are identified and in place. As an example, for many companies, working from home is now the norm.
That is where Virtual Private Server (“VPS”) hosting comes in. Simply put, VPS is where an Internet or Managed Service Supplier (“MSP”) like HostSailor provides shared infrastructure, and the corporate systems operate from there. The user can either manage the VPS infrastructure remotely or ask the MSP to do so.
There are lower-level options, such as Basic Hosting. However, these don’t have the power to support most corporate environments and aren’t really scalable.
At a higher level, full site outsourcing is often overkill and too expensive.
The middle option of VPS hosting can provide considerable cost savings at a fixed budget cost. A Windows 2019 server implementation has separate physical servers hosting a certificate authority and the domain controller and application and data servers. VPS hosting can reduce that to a single physical server running multiple virtual windows servers.
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. There is a common misconception that VPS Hosting is for Open Systems only, But Windows VPS Hosting is a reality, supporting Windows-based application systems.
However, its most common implementation is the Linux based platform, KVM. KVM comes with the Linux kernel, and it can be installed with Linux or as an upgrade later.
VPS 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.
Advantages of VPS Hosting
- Reductions in the physical resources needed, meaning reductions in capital expenditure and maintenance charges.
- Outsourcing daily routine operations and management of IT systems infrastructure to a third party VPS Hosting environment free up staff.
- No maintenance downtime
- Infrastructure flexibility. Your host manages the infrastructure needs of your VPS installation.
Downsides of VPS Hosting
- Some legacy and devices cannot operate in a virtual environment. If you have legacy items like alarm systems, they may need replacement.
- KVM has more significant resource requirements than other implementations of VPS, such as OpenVZ.
- A perceived loss of control in outsourcing daily operations.
For companies looking to fix a portion of their IT spend. VPS hosting is a very viable option.