Should you host your application or web site on a dedicated server or a cloud server?
There are many variables that go into selecting the right hosting service. One question that businesses face is whether to select Cloud Hosting or to move to a Dedicated Server. Each option has benefits. The final solution will depend on the specific needs of your business.
Cloud computing has many beneficial features. Cloud brings scalability, flexibility, and cost benefits. With cloud, you share resources. This means that when you need more resources, you pull from a pool and scale up to the level you need as you need it. You only pay for the resources you use. But with shared resources comes limitations. Cloud servers run in a virtualized environment that has inherent performance and resource limitations.
In addition, complying with certain security protocols may be an issue. PCI (Payment Card Industry - standards for accepting on-line credit card payments), FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act - student information privacy), and HIPAA (Health Insurance information privacy) have strict guidelines that require enhanced security and in some cases limit the use of shared processing and data storage resources. If your business handles credit card payments, medical records, or student records, a cloud server may not be an option. These applications would require you to have physically separate servers that limit the use of shared resources that are synonymous with cloud / vps solutions.
CeraNet offers a unique hybrid data center approach that allows you to use dedicated or colocated equipment with cloud servers so you can get the best of both worlds. Please contact us for more information.
Traditional Dedicated Server Scalability & High Availability
With traditional dedicated servers your scalability is directly correlated to the resources available on the physical hardware. In order to scale out your applications or services you need more resources available. This requires additional servers, load balancers, network configuration, advanced server configuration, switches, routers, witness servers (for SQL server clustering), etc. Dedicated servers hosting is the best way to host an application or web site that uses massive resources. You cannot duplicate with virtualized solutions the performance of a complete dedicated (or colo) solution.
CeraNet offers a great solution for customers looking for the performance of a dedicated server along with the flexibility of cloud computing and hosted services (for web + email, DNS, FTP, and dynamic data center solutions) -- hybrid data center services. This solution ties together your equipment with cloud servers using custom networking and an easy to use control panel.
CeraNet Cloud Server Scalability
CeraNet Cloud Servers are built for instant scalability with just in time computing resources. However, cloud servers have performance and resources limitations. You cannot match the disk read/write performance of a dedicated server. Cloud servers also have a finite limit to the number of processors and other resources. Cloud servers can be the most cost effective option when looking at typical applications. Cloud servers can instantly scale processing power, RAM memory, and storage independently allowing them to fully utilize available hardware resources in the most efficient way possible. Since you pay only for the resources used, this can be a very powerful option. However, the speed and resources that it can pull from has its limitations.
CeraNet's Hybrid Data Center solutions also allow you to combine dedicated servers, customer owned colocated equipment, custom firewall protection, with our cloud servers. This gives you the ultimate scalable solution.
Dedicated Server vs. Cloud Server Performance
Dedicated server performance is typically the same as a colocated or cloud server on most lower resource intensive applications. Dedicated servers will outperform cloud servers with certain high demand applications / services because they are not restricted by the overhead of a hypervisor or other software limitations.
CeraNet offers dedicated servers starting at $99 per month including considerable processing power, memory, and storage. Dedicated server solutions are custom quoted based on your exact specifications and can be configured with any option for processors, memory, storage, RAID, bandwidth / port speed, software, setup, config, etc. The pricing is very comparable to a cloud server with similar specs. Cloud servers have the benefit of flexibility - add/change/remove resources by clicking a button and selecting the options you want.
