Imagine your business has a strong seasonality component. You know that every summer your systems get hammered with new orders and increased traffic, but you are reluctant to buy a new, bulky physical server. It is so expensive! Also, the total cost you have outlined does not include the long-term support requirements.

What does the future hold?
You bite the bullet and you now have your behemoth, but a drive fails. More money and what is the return? Sales for the first year fell short of your previous demand estimates. Did you buy more technology than you needed? Could that money be better spent on marketing? It seems clear that your technology cost center is cannibalizing your ability to deliver on value to your customers.

With your own virtual private server, we allocate the resources you require, when you require them, on demand and at a much lower cost with much greater reliability. Best of all, when your needs change, we simply remove the system resources to reflect your new needs, and you never incur the sunk cost of a rapidly depreciating paperweight.

As technology advances, platforms that used to be out of reach for small and mid-sized businesses are becoming more widely available. This trend is leveling the playing field. Examples of this in action are virtualization and cloud-based technologies. As the cost of these services keep coming down, more and more businesses like yours have found the breakeven point, recognizing the true cost of managing their own equipment versus going with hosted solutions. It is quite clear. Focus on your competencies! Who needs to manage equipment that if not core to their business anyway?

Virtualization is right for you if you…

• Want to only pay for what you use
• Need flexibility in server resources
• Need speed in deploying servers
• Need speed in modifying resources without service interruption
• Need high availability to keep your server(s) up and running with absolute minimal downtime as part of your business continuity plan
• Have mission critical data that needs to be available to keep you in business
• Need a business continuity plan that keeps your applications online with the ability to move servers online quickly

If you are a business that has a very high input/output, resource intensive application that already runs in a clustered environment, virtualization may not be ready for you.

Overall the key benefits of virtualization are:

• Ability to deploy a server, clone a server, or restore a server in minutes. It can take days to build a physical server, first gathering the parts, then building the hardware, and then finding the drivers and then finally installing the OS and so forth.
• Minimal downtime to add or remove resources from a server. Often a physical server has limitations from the time it was built; from how many processers are available to how much memory and hard drives it can use. And the time it takes to boot a physical machine far surpasses the VPS boot time.
• Flexibility to run different platforms in the same virtual data center. Therefore, you may have only 2 machines clustered, but you can run Windows or Linux or any OS you choose on the same machine, because the virtual software is no longer tied to an Operating System.
• High Availability allows the server to be brought back up on another virtual server in the time it takes for the server to boot. Double resources are always available in a VPS so if hardware fails, it can easily be available on different hardware in the cluster in minutes.
• Redundancy of every resource of the hardware and network connections is available. By running systems virtually, you often don’t just run a mirror, but you can have it run across multiple pieces of hardware to maximize your redundancy.