Virtual Dedicated Server
What are Virtual Dedicated Servers?
Here at Intrahost our most popular product is the virtual dedicated server. Happy customers will mention flexibility, reliability, versatility and cost-effectiveness as just a few of the attractive features of a VDS. Here’s a more detailed look at the benefits of a virtual dedicated server and how we implement VDS for Intrahost clients.
But if you’re new to hosting you want the answer to the most basic question - what is a virtual dedicated server?
Essentially we take a powerful server (computer) in a data centre and we create a number of virtual servers on that one physical server.
Each virtual server (computer) will have its own OS installed, it will have its own hard drive space and its own RAM - these resources, as they are called, are dedicated to that virtual server and not shared with any other virtual server on that same physical server.
Consequently, each VDS is unaffected by the activities of any other VDS on the same physical server. Indeed, if an individual VDS should freeze or crash, none of the other VDSs on that physical server nor the physical server itself will be affected.
So a VDS is very much like owning a dedicated server but without the high cost, (because the multiple VDS split the overheads between them of the one physical server that they share).
At Intrahost we use VMware bare metal virtualisation. This is the most secure and reliable way of creating VDS. It does means that the resources available to a VDS have to be specified at the time of creation, and are unable to be increased “on the fly” should the need to do so arise. To increase the resources it’s necessary to reboot the individual VDS but as this is a relatively rare requirement its benefits outweigh this inconvenience, and it doesn’t affect any other VDS on the host server.
The alternative method of virtualization is software based - here many OS files are shared. It is, therefore, less reliable and it is also theoretically possible for cross-contamination between the Virtual Dedicated Servers on the same physical server to occur. Furthermore, Service Packs and Updates must be made on the host OS rather than each Virtual Machine, meaning that the complete set of Virtual Dedicated Servers may require rebooting during the update process. Virtual servers created by the software method should more properly be called VPS or Virtual Private Servers and it is because of these weaknesses that we do NOT use the software virtualization method at Intrahost.
