Why going “virtual” may be right for you
Most people are familiar with the what’s generally called “shared hosting” – whereby multiple clients share the resources of a single web server. This approach has a lot going for it – it allows for inexpensive web hosting because the costs of the server can be split among many clients – requiring each to pay less.
But shared hosting also has some problems. For one, the separation between clients on the same server is not extensive – while hosts do a lot to try to keep problems with one clients website from affecting others on the same server, when resources are shared, this is difficult. Furthermore, there can be problems rising from needs for specialized software configurations – for example some clients need PHP4, and some need PHP5 for their website… and the server can only have one version installed at a time.
The traditional solution to this problem was to go up to a dedicated server, where a server is only used by a single client. This makes for better security, performance, etc. It also means that the costs of the server must be borne by that one client – making dedicated hosting plans more expensive than is feasible for some clients.
Thankfully developments in virtualization technology have made a third option ever more useful. A virtual server is a server that runs on a “virtual machine” – a virtual version of a computer existing within the resources of a real physical machine. This virtual machine can be configured in all the ways that a “real” computer can be, and as far as the software running on it is concerned, it is a real machine.
Software like VMWare and Xen allow hosts to set up their servers to host multiple virtual machines – and these machines then can act as virtual dedicated servers for clients. Thus, the cost of the physical machine is split among the clients whose virtual servers are hosted there. The clients gain many of the benefits of a “real” dedicated server (stability, flexibility, security, performance) while still only paying a fraction of the cost of the actual computer.
This is especially helpful for ecommerce hosting, as ecommerce sites generally require greater security and often also need specialized ecommerce software like Magento which is difficult to set up on a shared hosting plan. By using a virtual server they can “start small” and not need a dedicated server right off the bat.
