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 of a virtual disk adapter. 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.
What are CPU Cores?
The CPU Core on a VPS is a virtual processor that correspond to a physical processor "Core" on the server hardware. Choosing a VPS with 2-Cores, means the Operating System (Windows or Linux) will recognize two processors. We enforce careful planning of CPU Cores/Ghz assigned to each VPS so we can maintain the highest flexibility & availability.
What does GHz mean?
The GHz (speed or frequency) determines how fast the CPUs can process information. Increasing the GHz, may also increase the CPU Core count (as of this writing 3.0GHz is the max GHz supported on a single CPU Core), once the physical limit in GHz has been reached additional cores are required to share the processing. Example: 6.5Ghz (6.5Ghz / 3GHz = 2.166) requires 3 CPU Cores because you must round up to the next whole number (CPU Core Count).