Businesses need secure, reliable, and high-performance processing and storage solutions for their applications and data. While comparing different hosting services, you are likely to see a variety of options to choose from. Deciding between physical servers and virtualisation often isn’t a simple choice, due to complex business requirements and the pros and cons of each service.
We hope this short guide will give you a better insight into understanding the advantages and disadvantages of virtual vs physical servers to help you choose what’s best for your business.
What are the pros of virtual servers?
- Virtual servers are stable, fast and secure. The ability to spin cloud servers up and down when suited is a major benefit to a lot of businesses, whether that’s for production purposes or staging and development.
- Virtual servers can provide a faster service for your money. You are likely to get more resources and a faster service than you would for a similar price of a physical server. A cloud-hosted website is also likely to run faster, depending on the applications you use.
- Scalability is an advantage for virtual servers. It is very easy and quick to upgrade by adding memory and disk space, as well as being more affordable.
What are the cons of virtual servers?
- Your data will sit in a shared virtual environment, which may mean your support levels won’t be as high as with a dedicated server, for example.
- Not all hardware can be virtualised (this is important to consider even though most applications are moving towards virtualisation).
What are the pros of dedicated servers?
- Dedicated hosting essentially means that your website or other application has its own server all to itself. As the sole user of the hardware you have control of your security and reliability. A good internet server provider will have designated technical staff at a data centre (such as our support team) to monitor the equipment and ensure that everything is running smoothly on your behalf.
- Depending on the configuration, you have complete control over the server, you are also in control of its security and deployment of use, including its resources, storage, memory, CPU and bandwidth. This is quite an important requirement if you are a business which has a specific level of standard you need the servers to work towards.
- Being the sole user of the hardware means that dedicated servers are highly configurable and can be built to specification. For example, they can be configured with either Windows or Linux operating systems with a variety of different control panels and applications.
What are the cons of dedicated servers?
- Dedicated servers are often costly and require a lot more work than using a virtual server.
Whichever you choose, our server hosting experts can help you make the right decision based on your business needs so you aren’t spending money unnecessarily. If you would like any further information or would like to discuss your current hosting options please don’t hesitate to get in touch – 0161 464 6101 we’ll be happy to help!
