subject: Virtual Dedicated Servers – a Breakthrough in Web Hosting [print this page] Virtual Dedicated Servers a Breakthrough in Web Hosting
For a dynamic, growing business, with increased amounts of web traffic, who maybe have an e-commerce solution, a dedicated server soon becomes a serious option. Businesses now relay on their websites like never before, so if the website goes down or offers a slow browsing experience for the end user, it can be very damaging to a companies' reputation.
A dedicated server is a web hosting server entirely dedicated to your site. Your site gets a unique IP address, which gives the added bonus of highlighting its uniqueness to certain search engines. As well as this, the site can support considerably more traffic than a website on a shared server. For mission critical websites, dedicated servers are essential for the success of a business as it ensures maximum availability and uptime.
However, if dedicated servers are too expensive to meet your requirements, there is an alternative solution which is more affordable, yet is still able to cope with mission-critical sites that need a high connection speed, high availability and maximum uptime.
It is now possible to benefit from the advantages of a dedicated server, but at a more reasonable cost, through a Virtual Dedicated Server (which is also known as a VDS or VPS). A "virtual dedicated server" is an emulation of a self-contained physical computer created entirely in software. More than one of these virtual machines can exist on a single computer, which has been configured as a virtual server host machine. If you imagine that one dedicated server can be split into multiple virtual environments, so multiple dedicated servers can essentially be on one physical piece of hardware.
A virtual dedicated server performs and behaves in ways almost identical to a physical dedicated server, but without the overheads of "real" hardware. Site owners can still choose between the Linux and Windows operating systems and choose their particular flavour of operating system like Centos, Debian, RedHat or Ubuntu. They can also install whatever website software they require, from forums and blog software like Wordpress, CMS software like Joomla or e-commerce software like Magento.
Although dedicated servers are still the recommended option, having an alternative solution offers more flexibility and choice to the web hosting market ensuring that everyone can deliver better websites at an affordable cost.
