VPS 101
Contents
What is a VPS?
A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine with an allocated portion of resources from a physical server. The VPS behaves similarly to physically hosted machine being completely dedicated to a single customers use, high level of privacy and can be configured as needed.
What is the Cloud?
Cloud Hosting is a term specific to utilizing Cloud Computing to deliver hosting services and is a set of hardware and software configured to share the resources as a pool. A portion of control (resource pool) is provided to the user to scale resources as needed. We provide this scalability (upgrading or downgrading), by request at any time.
What happens if a physical server fails?
In the event of a complete server failure or a catastrophic event, it's possible you won't even notice. You may experience a few minute delay (at most) while the VPS is starting up on another physical server. In most cases however we know if a server is having issues, and can live migrate any VPS to a new physical server without any disruption.
What is a SAN?
Storage Area Network (SAN) is a dedicated network for disk storage. This can include multiple storage devices that make up a cluster and are connected to servers by way ofa virtual disk adaptor. This is completely transparent to the user, the storage (disk space) looks and in many cases performs at a much higher level than physical disks due to the combined capacity. You may hear this term when discussing VPS, because the SAN makes up the default storage (disk space) provided on Virtual Private Servers.