Cloud Hosting Diagram (source: theplanet.com)

While I love the flexibility of dedicated hosting, I needed to find an alternative to help ease the costs of running the server. At Kettering University, where I work, we have been migrating dedicated servers to virtual environments. This allows us to host 4-5 different servers on one large big server. Now this trend is catching on in the hosting industry as well. For example my host, theplanet.com, has created a new line of servers called “Cloud Servers” essentially this is the same concept that Kettering uses, although it is automated! I received my new “virtual” server in about 15 minutes. The new server allows me to have total control (except for selection of the OS, which is Cent OS). So I can install anything I want like a dedicated server and all for roughly half of the cost! So far I’ve been pretty pleased, the new server has actually handled the demand of my sites better than the dedicated host (that I purchased in 2006).

Some main differences are the pooling of resources mainly in hard drive storage (SAN). Sites with high database usage may have issues due to latency issues, although my sites that have large mySQL databases (10 Gbs or so with roughly 100 users accessing the information at once) haven’t had any issues at this point.