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 a traditional single or multiple physical hard drives. You may hear this term when discussing VPS, because the SAN makes up the default storage (disk space) provided on Virtual Private Servers.