Server hardware is inevitably trending away from the office and into the virtual, and companies are left with a number of choices when it comes to their storage and server options. More and more businesses are seeing the advantage of getting rid of their old physical storage sites in favor of hosted options, with many choosing to move between 20 and 50 percent of their storage out of the building and into the waiting arms of a provider. While this new market is steadily growing, there are a number of choices available to users who are looking to get the best value for their dollar – the most common being virtual servers, dedicated servers and shared hosting.
Dedicated servers are those that are rented out by a company and that will host only one business on a physical machine. While this guarantees that the company will be the only one using resources, it can mean problems if a crash occurs as backups may be the province of the renter, not the supplier. Shared hosting has better backup options but means that multiple users are all on the same shared host and often one will take the lion’s share of resources, limiting the ability of other users to make the best use of the system’s resources.
Virtual private servers, meanwhile, try to balance these issues by providing the ability for easy migration and combining it with the privacy of a dedicated machine. While other users may exist in the same physical space, the hardware that is being used will treat each storage instance as separate. Many of these VPS options have persistent backup and better I/O use but the technology for all three options is just beginning to mature.
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