Cloud is a word that is used a lot nowadays, but its meaning may still be a bit confusing. In general people tend to use the word “cloud” when they refer to a set of virtual services that can potentially be located in more that one physical place and that can grow infinite.
The aim of this article is to give a better definition of the “cloud server” concept. In order to understand what a cloud server is we must first start giving the definition of a Virtual Private Server or VPS.
A VPS is a server that runs its own copy of an operating system on a hypervisor. A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A physical server on which a hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines is defined as a host machine. Each virtual machine is called a guest machine or VPS. The hypervisor presents the guest operating systems thanks to a software layer that makes the underlying hardware completly transparent and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources and customers have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install any software that runs on that OS having a complete dedicated environment.
For many purposes they are functionally equivalent to a dedicated physical server, and being software-defined, are able to be much more easily created and configured. This allows VPSs to be priced much lower than an equivalent physical server, but as they share the underlying physical hardware with other virtual servers, performance may be lower, and may depend on the workload of other instances on the same hardware node.
Usually with the word “cloud server” people refer to a VPS giving a specific accent to the fact that it is possible to increase or decrease resourses on demand and move the server easily from one host to another one without any outage in case of a hardware failure. So basically referring to a cloud servers means assuming that the provider of your VPS has enough resources (infrastructure) to handle at any time a request of increase and be able to relocate your VPS in case of a hardware failure on one of the physical nodes. When opting for cloud server, clients are renting virtual server space rather than renting or purchasing physical servers. They are often paid for by the hour depending on the capacity required at any particular time.
This allows clients to get the benefits of a dedicated solution with the price of a shared one. Resource can be scaled up or scaled down accordingly, making it more flexible and, therefore, more cost-effective. When there is more demand placed on the servers, capacity can be automatically increased to match that demand without this needing to be paid for on a permanent basis.
Hereafter yout can find a list of the key benefits of a cloud servers:
Stay tuned to find out what you should look for when you purchase a cloud server and what you should absolutetly avoid. If you need help straight away, contact us and one of our representative will help you choosing the best Cloud Server solution for you needs.
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