The Advantages of Web Hosting with a VM

As cloud hosting becomes viable for more and more companies, the decision comes down to benefits the organization will see from the platform. The decision should come at the application and service level. Cloud hosting provides customers virtual machines that provide a finite amount of resources for the cost. In this example, we will look at the advantages of virtualizing LA web hosting by moving it to the cloud.

Security – To get the benefits of virtualization, all sub services need to operate in their virtual machines. In the case of web hosting, the web server should run on its server while other services like DNS, SQL will run on other virtual machines. If and when there is a security breach of one VM, the others remain unaffected.

Migration – You can also migrate, update or upgrade one component without affecting any of the others. Let’s say you want to change from MySQL to Postgres, then all you need to do is bring up a new VM, set up the new database server. When the installation is complete, point the web server to the new database server and shutdown the old VM.

Backup – Keeping backups of applications and data is critical. With virtualization, you can take snapshots or backups of entire VM’s. Cloud hosting providers like Rack Alley have hundreds of servers around the world. You can create geographical redundancy by keeping backup VM’s in other countries.

Load – A sudden surge in traffic could cripple your entire website when all the systems are running on the same server. When you have individual VM’s, only the web server will take the hit. At that point, you can either increase resources or bring up additional VM’s to handle the load.