Physical Servers to Virtual Servers – Are you waiting too?

Are you waiting like Dan?

Dan is a real life individual.  I’ll leave the last name off 🙂

Several months ago Dan contacted us about his server situation.  Dan has a few servers in his local office that are getting older and he is considering moving to a Cloud hosting environment.

Dan waited…

Then… one day Dan had a server crash and he called us frantically, wanting to get him and his clients moved to the cloud ASAP.  In the end, Dan was thrilled that we were able to quickly get him a production ready server online and he was able to start bringing his applications back online in under 25 minutes.

Dan was very comfortable with his existing servers.  Making the change to a virtual environment (before the crash) to him was like visiting some strange land never visited before.

Moving from a physical server environment to a cloud server environment is a no-brainer once you really know the environment and have experience managing both dedicated servers and virtual servers.

I put my ‘Dan’ hat on for a while and tried to process in my head some of the thoughts that Dan may have been thinking.

• Can I get help when needed?
• Will the server be fast?
• What happens when I need a bigger server or another server?
• How will I manage the server; it’s always been right in front of me?
• What happens if the hardware fails?
• How difficult will it be to migrate everything over?

Dan may have more or less questions than the above, but these are some likely common questions that he was having.  These are great questions and I will take the ‘Dan’ hat off now and answer each of these.

Can I get help when needed?

Absolutely – the awesome US support team at Hostek.com is available 24x7x365.  The average response time to tickets is under 20 minutes.  We love to help customers be successful with their cloud hosting needs.

Will the server be fast?

Yes, we utilize the latest in Dell servers.  With our cloud hosting environment, we are able to add new servers at any time and also decommission outdated servers without any interruption.  This allows us to always be offering the latest in Dell servers in our cloud.

While the server (VPS) itself has very fast CPU resources, if you try to overload the server without giving the applications the resources they need, then you would have a slower performing server.  That’s not a server problem.  That’s a planning problem.  Our team has years of experience helping customers properly plan their hosting needs.

What happens when I need a bigger server or another server?

Your server can be upgraded at any time.  A reboot is needed and we would work with you to get that processed at a time convenient for you.

To add another server, you would simply add the server from our plans pages.  Then if you needed a private connection (VLAN) between the two servers, that is no problem.  Having a VLAN for private communication between servers is a very common setup for web application servers communicating with a separate database server.  For PCI compliance, having the database server separate is needed.

How will I manage the server; it’s always been right in front of me?

How you manage the server would depend on the server type.  For example…

Windows based server… you would connect with an RDP client like RoyalTS, mRemote, Microsoft’s RDP client, Jump (Mac), Cord (Mac), etc.  When connected you can full screen the view and it would be just like sitting in front of the server.

Linux based server (with or without cPanel)… you would connect with SSH, so again, just like being in front of the server.

You have the relief of not dealing with the hardware issues going forward.

What happens if the hardware fails?

This is one of the most exciting reasons to have your application or site hosted in our cloud environment.  In a traditional physical dedicated server setup, if your hardware fails, you are down until you can get the hardware replaced or fixed.

The cool and exciting part of our virtual environment (our private cloud) is that vmWare will automatically move your server to different hardware.  We keep the load on the host servers light so that we always have plenty of excess capacity in case of a server problem, to ensure that there would be no impact on your hosted application or site’s performance.

How difficult will it be to migrate everything over?

Depending on your application, you may want to handle the migration yourself, or we can provide migration assistance.  We have helped thousands of customers migrate to our infrastructure.  Migration can be a simple process when done properly.  We have lots of experience to help you in this area.

No double billing!  If you are colo’d somewhere currently or have a VPS elsewhere and want to get integrated into our cloud environment, please schedule a consultation and we can work with you to avoid double billing during your transition process.

Being in the hosting industry since early 1998, I know first hand the awesome benefits of our cloud hosting environment over the traditional physical server hosting environment.  Before virtualization, when there was a hardware failure, we had to have all hands on deck getting the server back online.  With the virtual cloud environment, server failures are planned for in advance by keeping tons of extra capacity so prevent interruptions.  The difference is amazing once you have experienced the difference between individual physical servers and the virtual hosting environment.

So… Don’t be like Dan
Don’t wait until you are in critical mode before deciding to move to our cloud environment.  We have 18+ years of providing great hosting experience.  We don’t lock customers into long time contracts like some hosts.  We continue to grow every day because of our great customer service, 24/7 support and great hosting experience at affordable prices.

Our team isn’t just interested in making a sale.  Quite the opposite.  Our goal is to help you find the right solution that meets your needs.  We would love to be a part of your solution and know we have the experience you are looking for.

Categories: Business Tips, Developers, Hosting