Choosing Dedicated Versus Virtual Servers

Web hosting requirements of different customers are different. They need diversified web hosting solutions to satisfy all crucial needs of their business. Large enterprises or huge e-Commerce companies’ need dedicated servers for hosting their large web applications over the web. However, nowadays even startup companies are feeling the urge to get a dedicated web server to serve their hosting needs.

Renting a dedicated web server is expensive affair. A virtual server may also serve their needs. So, it is a matter of debate that which one to choose from dedicated servers or virtual servers. This article will answer this important question as well as help in making decision of selecting from virtual web servers and dedicated web servers.

Dedicated Web Servers

Dedicated Web Servers as the name suggests are meant to provide dedicated service to the customer who rent it. The customer has full control over these servers. For dedicated Linux web servers they have root access, and for Windows Web Severs they have administrator access, that means customers using dedicated web servers are free to configure the server as par their own requirements, they can install required software onto it.

A variant of dedicated web hosting services is managed hosting. If chosen this type of service, customers do not need to worry about the maintenance or security issues of servers. The hosting service provider handles these crucial issues.

Virtual Web Servers

Virtual web servers (also referred as virtual private servers) share the resources (hardware, disk space, RAM) of a web server. Virtualization software (like Virtuozzo) is used to create virtual web servers. Each virtual server can have different operating system and software installed depending upon customer’s requirement. Customers will have full access (administrative controls) to their own virtual private space. They can manage it accordingly, but they are not allowed to manage security issues (like Firewalls, Antivirus software) individually.

Now, it is very easy to figure out that if rented a dedicated server, customer will have full access along with the option to utilize 100% resources of server. However, in case of virtual private severs, customer’s have to share the resources with others using different virtual server on same web server.

In case of running high end performance based web applications, the performance may be affected. So, for crucial process that may lead to high user load and requiring more processing power and other hardware resources, people are advised to select dedicated web hosting. However, is someone is just looking for a server with privacy (not available in shared hosting) they can think of renting a virtual private server.