Virtual Private servers are normally quite expensive for example many web hosts offer Virtuozzo VPS's ranging from £30-40 per month. However there is no comparison between others as they are quite cheap. With growing competition prices are coming down and down and one can get a "real" server for just £29 monthly. Now the question comes why to rent a virtual private server when one can just have a real server for quite less?
However there are people who assume that the next best "step up" from a shared hosting account is a dedicated server. However in reality selecting a cheapest dedicated server is an expensive deal.
It is a mere fact that a professional hosting company would not stay in business quite long if it is hosting on a shared hosting account with as low as cost of £29 per month for dedicated servers. Hosting servers requires quite a big capital investment on the part of the host. In order to face the load it is necessary for even a simple hosting server to have dual processors most probably up to 4-8 GB of RAM. It is not possible for a hosting server to rely solely on a single IDE hard drive. If we talk about present web world, RAID is the most essential thing at this hour. Full form of RAID is "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs."
Talking about the specification there are various types of RAID configuration but the minimum RAID setup requires at least two hard drives and is called RAID1 or "mirroring." The best part of RAID1 is in case any one of the disc fails there is still an image on the remaining drive containing all the files and operating system. It is quite often that if a disc fails on server with RAID, the server can carry on hosting hundreds or thousands of websites, email until a server technician calls into the data centre with a replacement hard drive. Several times it is possible that this task can be done without rebooting the server, due to "hot swappable" hard drive which is a utility found in every expensive web hosting servers.
Talking about next common drive or RAID configurations is RAID5. In this case of RAID5 minimum of three discs are required. The best part of RAID5 is that it not only offers redundancy but also increases performance. It is worth to note that the type of hard drive used in hosting is different from the common IDE drive found in the personal computer.
In hosting business very fast and expensive SCSI drives with great speeds of around 10,000 RPM or more are required to cope even though cheaper SATA drives are also becoming increasingly popular. Talking about working, it's usual for the RAID to be handled in hardware using a RAID controller, however both Linux and Windows operating systems support "software RAID."
With less cost of mere £29 per month, it’s unlikely to have any of the big advantages like of RAID, SCSI, hot swap, dual processors, dual power supplies etc. in dedicated server. Not only that cheap dedicated servers are just little more than rack optimized desktop computers. There are many people who ignore the possibility of catastrophic disc failure. Though hard drive manufacturers quote optimistic "MTF" (mean time before failure) statistics, still it is common to find that hard drive failure happens quite frequent in data centers.
Thus if one thinks that the time has come when a dedicated server is required, then he/she must consider a dedicated server having all the benefits that a more expensive hardware suited to shared or VPS hosting is offering. The best part is to have a dedicated server with RAID, and dual processors are just £150 per month.
Now if even this amount is more for a user, then it is must to own VPS. The concept of VPS hosting is quite similar to the mainframe idea in the early 1960's. In that era computers were so expensive that most businesses instead of buying them use to rent time on a mainframe.
Thus before finalizing a cheap dedicated server one must keep in mind all the specification offered by the company. A VPS provides sharing on a better class of "mainframe" hardware and with more hearty solution.
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