Is your company finally ready to make the jump to a high-level hosting option? Do you currently use one, but you want to know about the other options you could choose from?
Whatever the case, below, we’ll look at three popular types: private bare-metal servers, private virtual servers, and private clouds.
Bare-Metal Servers
These types of servers actually refer to a service, whereby a company can rent hardware resources from another company, a remote service provider.
There are many benefits to going this route, but the biggest is probably that a bare-metal cloud offers a large degree of flexibility. Your company can customize its bare-metal cloud installation based on your unique needs and then troubleshoot applications as you wish without having to worry about how that might affect neighboring virtual machines. Likewise, you don’t have to consider what will happen if these virtual machines begin fighting over resources.
As bare-metal cloud installations are made from a collection of dedicated servers, they avoid these problems and are also great for big data applications. They’re also growing in popularity with organizations that have high-transaction workloads that don’t have much tolerance for latency of any kind.
Of course, one potential drawback you need to consider is that the kind of customization private bare-metal servers provides means you’re responsible for picking out each component. Configuration and its consequences are 100% your responsibility.
Private Virtual Servers
A private virtual server is fairly self-explanatory. It’s a virtual server that is accessible to only one company. As it “belongs” to just one organization, it also affords this company a large degree of customization; you can install and run whatever software you want, including web servers, mail server programs, blogging tools, ecommerce features, etc.
These servers have become especially popular with small- to medium-sized businesses that want the benefits of this kind of customization but can’t afford to pay for their own dedicated server.
With this customization comes a high-level degree of flexibility, too. One single user can easily maintain a number of virtual servers or numerous domains within an individual virtual private hosting environment.
Scalability comes easy with a private virtual server, as well. This is another reason small- and medium-sized businesses have adopted them in such large numbers. As their needs grow, their server’s capabilities can, too. Best of all, this can happen without massive IT management investments or other expenditures.
At the same time, if a company needs to minimize its virtual footprint, they can scale down without ending up paying for services they no longer need.
Private Clouds
Finally, let’s talk about private clouds. These are single-tenant environments where the hardware, network and storage are dedicated to a single company.
If your organization works within a heavily-regulated industry, like banking or healthcare, a private server is probably going to be the preferred hosting method. That’s because private servers lend themselves to compliance. Following PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and other important regulations cannot be done over a public cloud. With a private cloud, you have control over every element of your setup.
Another reason private cloud solution providers do so well with compliance is because it’s easier to keep your servers extremely secure. Again, because of the level of customization you’re afforded, you can make sure that every piece of your setup is tuned to deliver the most secure results possible. Of course, you also don’t have to worry about other clients in your data center being able to access your server.
Finally, your company may benefit most from a hybrid deployment. With a private cloud, you can combine the features you need from different options and create the perfect custom product.
After reading the above information, you will now have a much easier time choosing the server deployment that will work best for your company.