Cloud Hosting

Dedicated Server vs. Cloud Servers

The web industry has grown tremendously with new features and technologies developed to improve and ease any kind of hosting for the customer. For instance, some hosting companies have already adopted the technology of Citrix XenServer, which is affordable and easy to manage plus course scalability. 

 

Cloud hosting using this technology is built in redundant storage servers and several disks, which contain a large amount of storage space running up to thousands of gigabytes.  The storage space is always ready, for instance, usage whenever the customer(s) demand for more space because there are several disks interconnected. Most dedicated servers usually have one hard drive for their storage space. This means that, a customer is given one particular hard drive for all his or her data storage needs of whatever storage space, and he or she is supposed to utilize and take care of the hard drive from hackers and unauthorized access that may risk loss of his or her data. The disadvantage for having or suing one hard drive is that in case there is disk failure on the only one hard drive he has.  It means that he will lose all the data stored or transferred in that system.

Cloud systems have a higher storage tolerance as compared to dedicated servers. For instance, it will be able to survive several drive failures and still keep all its VPS systems up and running. Due to the multiple drives interconnected, there is no particular hard drive that belongs to a certain website hosting company or individual but instead their data is distributed to any available drive at the time of need while data is shared or copied to all other drives keeping every individual safe from data loss due to disk failures. 

For dedicated servers, any little drive failure means that a section or the entire customer’s data is at risk of loss and require several hours of maintenance and data recovery from backups, which translates to long downtimes. Cloud servers offer the ability to upgrade and update the system instantly from a provided control panel online. This offers the user the ability to configure all aspects in his server freely without any kind of limitations as compared to dedicated servers. Dedicated servers are only scaled to the user’s demand and whenever upgrading is needed, there are longer downtimes expected since the servers are disturbed (un-racked) before they are updated the re-racked again to operate normally having saved all the changes. During this un-racking and re-racking process, the servers will be down.  

It is now clear that cloud servers have full redundancy making it available in every second of time. For instance, if the host server breaks down, it instantly responds by restarting a host program in another host in a matter of seconds and keeping the server up and running again, which reduces greatly its downtimes. Dedicated servers are not blessed with this option since they rely on one hard drive, which means the server is either working or not at all.