Virtualisation alongwith cloud computing are the hottest buzzwords in the online IT world today. Both these technologies are very promising and on a long term basis it would help lower the TCO (total cost of operation) for the consumers and ensure a scalable service infrastructure where the underlying hardware becomes a virtualised commodity.

At Diadem, we like to be on the leading edge by deploying these technologies on our network infrastructure and enable our clients to benefit from such services. Our Virtual Private Server offerings is the result of over six months of dedicated effort in research, testing and deployment to enable implementation of stable, reliable and cost effective VPS offerings for our clients.

So what is a VPS and why do I need one?

Virtual Private Servers is an offshoot of OS virtualisation, which allows you to run more than one operating system simultaneously or singly on a single machine by sharing the same hardware resources. While OS virtualisation has been existence since the 1960’s, it has evolved rapidly over the past decade, thanks to the explosive growth of the Internet requiring ever more servers online and the need by businesses to cut down their  IT spend and consolidating multiple OS for different functions, within a single server. Server virtualisation is now a proven and accepted technology which enterprises of all shapes and sizes are embracing rapidly for their server deployment needs to ensure that their server infrastructure is well utilised and generate a higher ROI from their IT investments.

Here is my non technical description of a VPS:

“A Virtual Private Server is a ‘server within a server’ which allows you to have your own memory space, HDD capacity and CPU resources and enables you to run your own Operating System within a dedicated server. Consider it to be your own apartment within a multi-storied building. Every apartment owner has their own living space, bedrooms and other areas which they could beautify and update as per their individual needs but they also share a common entrance to the building with the rest of the apartment owners, a common heating and sewage system, electrical wiring and other such features to reduce the cost of the apartment per individual.”

Benefits of a VPS in comparison with dedicated servers or shared hosting is highlighted below:

  • A virtual server is significantly cheaper to run than a standalone dedicated server in which an entire server is dedicated for a specific client.
  • It allows clients to experiment their application on a smaller scale without having to make upfront investments on a dedicated server.
  • Businesses can run multiple servers with different operating systems from within the same physical server, thereby reducing the cost and increasing the utilisation of a dedicated server.

Compared to a shared hosting environment, here are the key benefits of a VPS:

  • It is a secure environment dedicated for the client to run their websites online and retain complete control on the server.
  • Server OS settings can be tweaked and optimised as per the requirement of a specific application.
  • Corporates can run their own mailing servers in a secure VPS which would allow them to create unlimited email ids, web space for individual users with customised antispam and mail archiving solutions.
  • Clients can consolidate multiple sites on a single VPS and manage them from a single OS.
  • Web design firms can operate their own hosting services without having to share credit with a web hosting firm.

Our VPS Story

While we have been dabbling with virtualisation for the past year, we seriously got into delivering it as a service to our clients towards the end of last year. There were three main contenders for the virtualisation platform, Windows HyperV, VMWare ESXi and Citrix XenServer and we gave them a fair evaluation from our end. While each server virtualisation platform has its own pros and cons and new features are being developed and deployed for all these hypervisors on a rapid scale, we found Citrix XenServer to be the most suitable for our needs. Following are the primary reasons why we choose XenServer over the other hypervisors:

  • The Citrix XenServer is FREE for personal and commercial use.
  • It is packed with tools and features which are available as paid options or are non existent in other hypervisors.
  • Citrix XenServer is based on the industry standard Xen hypervisor which is an open source virtualisation platform.
  • There is a large community backing Xen and it is a well documented system.
  • It has a small memory footprint which makes it less resource intensive on the server.
  • It is stable, easy to deploy and is supported by Citrix Systems which is a leader in virtualisation technologies.

Now that we have done the heavy lifting in putting our virtualisation infrastructure in place, we would like you to benefit from our VPS offerings, which is available in both Linux and Windows platforms. Checkout our Linux VPS and Windows VPS plans which are specially developed considering the requirements of the Indian market and are available from a low monthly cost of Rs. 1999 per month. We would be putting up more resources, howtos, offers and updates highlighting our VPS services over the next few months so watch this space! [ratings]