So, you know that you need a hosting solution, but you don’t know exactly what you need. You know that you have two options – cloud or dedicated – but what exactly is the difference?
Briefly, a dedicated server is your own personal space in one of our datacentres. It’s just yours, and you don’t have to worry about your performance being affected by others. Cloud Servers are instances of a Virtual Machine running in a hypervisor environment managed by Networkmanager.
Each solution has its own advantages. There is no steadfast rule that says which solution is the correct one, because there is no correct one, generally. It’s all about figuring out which is right for you, and your business.
Imagine that you need to run to the shops for some milk, but the parking meter has a minimum charge of £3 for three hours, frustrated, and desperate for milk to go on your Cheerios you begrudgingly put three one pound coins into the machine.
Your phone bill gives you unlimited minutes but you only use 30 of them every month, because who actually talks on the phone anymore? You can’t change it because you’re stuck in a 24-month contract.
Why would you pay for something you aren’t going to use? With cloud servers you can pay for exactly what you need. If you originally allocate too much memory, or storage, then CloudNX gives you the advantage of scaling down – or up – your package so that you’re only paying for what you’re using. You’re running a business, we know that you’re far too busy to sit at your monitor adjusting sliders, but with cloud servers this can all be done on the go on your mobile device.
Dedicated servers do not work in the same way as cloud servers. If you need more space, you’d have to invest in more servers, or you’d have to schedule a maintenance window when you could upgrade your specs. But you still have a certain amount of control over dedicated servers. From a web browser you can easily check the status of your server, perform quick updates or even hardware reboots.
One benefit of a dedicated server is that because all of the power on it is allocated to you, and you alone, you get access to everything and don’t have to worry about other people on the Virtual Machine using a large amount of the CPU/RAM – slowing you down. This is especially true with disk IO, if someone else on the Cloud Server is sending a lot of write requests to their own virtual machine, your own performance could deteriorate.
In an ideal world nothing would ever go wrong. With our dedicated servers we boast a 99.99% uptime guarantee, and with our fully resilient and redundant cloud servers we go .009% of a step further with a 99.999% uptime guarantee. But, in the event that anything does go wrong, it’s good to have peace of mind. With both cloud and dedicated servers we have a highly knowledgeable UK customer care team that are fully equipped to help and advise you 24/7.
For more information on cloud servers or dedicated servers, visit the Networkmanager website.