Cloud Hosted Options, Virtual vs Dedicated

What is cloud hosted?

Cloud hosted is a service where the 'computer' that you use is hosted in a data-centre and managed by a cloud provider. There are many cloud providers like GEN, AWS, Azure, IBM, but they all perform the same function, your 'computer' remotely hosted. Cloud hosted can come in two distinct flavours, either virtualised, or dedicated, and this article will discuss the differences, and advantages of each.

Virtual

In most cloud hosted configurations, your 'computer' won't be a physical device in the way you would normally think of a computer, instead it's 'virtual' meaning that the computer and its operating system runs in an emulator that emulates a physical computer. The operating system and anything you run on this 'virtual' computer are unaware that everything is emulated and functions as normal. Virtualisation is a mature technology that allows a number of really big physical servers to support hundreds of virtual computers.

The storage for virtual machines is also not physical, and instead storage is 'thin' provisioned from a storage area network, providing hyperconverged virtualisation where storage is virtual and resizeable.

High Availability

With Virtualisation, it's possible and commonplace to have high availability solutions, in that, the virtual computer is actually hosted on more than one physical, and if that physical should fail or be overloaded or suffer a network issue, traffic will instantly switch to the other. High availability is needed when your solution requires high uptime, and it does of course attract a charge.

Dedicated

In dedicated cloud hosted, your computer is a real physical computer in the way you would normally think of a computer, it's a physical unit with a motherboard, disk drives, power supply and case, and most importantly, it's all yours and you're not sharing it with anyone else. Dedicated cloud hosts are a new, and growing trend, and they are often used for businesses that need to have a dedicated server farm, or a dedicated application server, or a dedicated database server.

Containers

Containers, are similar to virtual but generally cheaper and provide out-of-the-box services for many mainstream solutions. For example, you may want a company chat application, and you could have a virtual or dedicated cloud host but then you'd have to install the chat app yourself and be responsible for its upkeep, whereas containers allow a chat application, e.g. Rocket.chat to be setup very quickly, with all the installation done for you, and only requiring configuration. Containers are generally cheaper than virtual because they are much smaller and dedicated, but it's all down to factors of scale. If you wanted a rocket.chat service for 100 users, then containers are the most cost effective way to go, and you'll only generally be paying for storage, but if you wanted a rocket.chat for 10,000 users then a container isn't going to cut it and you would need to look at virtual or dedicated.

Virtual Shared

If you are only looking to host web-apps in the cloud, such as a thin client (browser based) system, then virtual shared is a cheaper and easier option in many ways. Virtual shared hosting means that you get the full stack, that's a web server, language support, email, sftp with support for a low monthly rental, and here your billing is fixed with a bandwidth quota (the traffic sent to and from your website) and a storage quota, the total amount of space for the website, and all mailboxes. Virtual Shared takes away all of the server management responsibilities and leave you with a clean web console to manage the service.

Location, DP and GDPR

For any company within the UK or EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) puts certain regulatory constraints on cloud hosting, read our article 20240529 for an in depth analysis.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Virtualisation is much cheaper for smaller solutions, and far more flexible than dedicated, and this is due to the way virtual hosts can be reconfigured limitlessly. Let's assume that you selected a Virtual20 service from GEN, which provides you with 2 processors, 4GB of RAM, 40GB of storage and a SLA3 service level, and you use that to host a SaaS solution that you've developed. Then as your business grows your site becomes slower and a touch laggy, with virtualisation you simply need to upgrade to Virtual40, and suddenly, as if by magic, your virtual host will now have 4 processors, 16GB of RAM and 100GB of storage, within minutes.

This ability to upgrade and downgrade almost instantly is one of the major advantages of virtualisation and allows changes to be quickly made. With a dedicated service, upgrading processors in many cases will require new physical hardware, and you'll need to re-install everything on that. RAM can be upgraded but only to a point and disk upgrades again often require a re-install (depending on the options selected at time of purchase). Dedicated is more expensive, and you're often tied into an annual contract with installation costs, whereas virtualisation is zero installation costs and rolling monthly.

If you're looking for a quick setup, packaged solution for common open source services, then a container is probably the best way to go for smaller demands

You cannot easily move from one to the other, you would simply need to purchase the 'other' and then re-install your solution onto that, finally switching over. So choosing the right option at the outset is important.

Capacity

GEN, at the time of writing this article, have 3 virtualisation clusters, providing over 2000 CPU's, 2TB of RAM and 16PB of storage, so we have massive capacity, and you're unlikely to ever require more than we can provide, and this is not the case with all cloud providers.

Backup

For any cloud hosted solution, backup is vitally important, and of course GEN provide a selection of backup services, from snapshots, to images to sequential. You can of course perform the backup's yourself as many of our dedicated customers do, but having GEN provide it is a far simpler solution.

Specialist

One reason you may opt for dedicated rather than virtual would be if you needed something special, for example you may want a dual processor, 64GB of RAM, 10TB of storage, and 2x Nvidia P100's for an AI or machine learning solution, in this case, dedicated is the only way to go because virtualisation, which able to provide most of that will be far more expensive especially if your utilisation is high. Specialist dedicated solutions is not something you can order via this website so contact us for pricing.

Usage

Some cloud providers charge you for many things, like CPU usage, Disk Usage, Network Usage, and this can make it hard to forecast costs, with GEN we only put a limit on bandwidth, which is the amount of data you send and receive over the network, and it's a fairly high limit that almost no one ever hits. This simplified pricing means that you're only paying a fixed monthly charge and never receive any unexpected bills (fair usage applies).

Support

One of the many pitfalls that companies stumble into when cloud hosting, is the lack of support. If you procure a virtual host from AWS for example, then you're on your own, and if it fails or you have issues, you've got to fix it. GEN is unique in the industry, because support is what we do, and everything we do revolves around support. If you have an issue with any virtual or dedicated cloud host then we're only a few clicks away, and we'll resolve it. Moreover, where most if not all providers only support the hardware, GEN supports the O/S and the applications, we are literally at your disposal for any issue you may encounter and will be there to help you. The cost, and speed of our response is keyed to our service levels, which offer everything from a 4 hour response, Monday to Friday, 0900-1700, through to a 1 hour response 24/7, you simply choose the one that fits your needs.

Conclusion

the choice depends on specific business needs, including budget constraints, performance requirements, and security considerations. Virtualised offers flexibility and cost efficiency, while physical provide specialist configurations and fixed performance, with containers providing that out-of-the-box solution at smaller scales.

The services we list on our website, are common/popular services, but we're not a mass market provider and we can and do provide custom solutions to many clients. You can, for example, have virtualised or remote storage with a dedicated host, or dedicated or remote storage with a virtualised host, and many others.

We strongly recommend you discuss your requirements with a cloud specialist at GEN to select the most applicable solution to your specific needs, and of course there is no charge for pre-sales consultancy.

Blog Index   PermaLink   Comment           10 Votes