Running a successful web hosting business is not an easy task because it requires huge investment in both hardware/software as well as advanced server professionals employment. But, thoese rules only apply to a formal and ethical company. If you have played around a bit in web hosting you might have found it's not that hard to start a business with it. That's why there're so many new setup brands in the industry and caused lots of complaints by users.

Unlike the reputable hosting provider who have their own datacenter and server equipments, a starter company may just rent a single dedicated server or VPS to start their business. They don't have to invest a lot to prepare the basic environment. Once it's ready to accept customer, they will try to spam the internet to get orders. It's absolutely very important to avoid such hoster in case of any potential problem. In this thread, we're going to discuss how to detect if your hosting server is virtual or dedicated. If you're hosted on a virtual server, you're probably with a inept service and you should pay serious attention to it.

How to check if you're hosted on virtual or physical server?

Because of the fast development with virtualization tech, it makes almost no difference between gest and host server. However, no matter how we virutlize the physical server, there's still some difference to check out.

For example If we have access to server end we can run this imvirt script to load the environment information directly. It will tell if the OS is virtualized from the popular technologies such as Virtual PC, VMware, EMU/KVM, Xen, OpenVZ/Virtuozzo etc. It's by fast the most popular script for virtualization checking.

But, most of the time we don't have server access for shared hosting environment. What we do? Here we highly recommend some probe softwares that doesn't require root permission. What to use? PHPsysinfo is definitely the primary consideration. With this software will see clearly how much diskspace/memory on the server and what kind of cpu/ram it has, it will also tell us what kind of server kernel being used as well as the live resource usage and system alerts. Based on the cool info, we can easily judge if the server is virtual or physical. How do we judge?

First, we can look up the server kernel. Many VPS will show up the virtual type in kernel description such as "Linux let 2.6.32-5-xen-amd64", that means the server is XEN based VPS. However, not all server will tell the truth, so we need to move to next step. We need to look up the overall amount RAM and Disk space. If the number is too small, it's definitely not a dedicated server or at least not a quality dedicated server.

Nowadays, most hosting companies have updated their server hardwares with up to date products. By using SAN technologies, the total disk space on shared server is always very big. A standard shared hosting server should like this for most cases "Disk ≧500GB, RAM ≧8GB", the server CPU should be Intel i7 for best performance.

As we know, the shared server is always serving over one hundred hosting accounts with several hundreds of websites. If the overall resource is too little, customer will run into problems quickly.

Above are some basic methods to detect if your hosting server is virtual or physical. Of course, if we search a bit more, there're many other ways provided by professionals. We always discuss if a hosting service good or not. It's actually not that hard, just sign up and check out the server specs. If the basic but the most important server hardware can't meet the basic requirements for hosting server, then nothing will be good.

Tips for novice to choose right hosting service

A. go with the popular brands, don't change to a new hoster because they offer more for less money.

B. Do further research to your interested company, find both positive and negative comments from their clients.

C. Contact pre-sales support and ask few questions to check their profesinoality and responding speed, you can try out both chat/ticket and email support if all available.

Lastly, if you're still not sure how to choose, contact me on this site and I will answer your questions in earlist time 🙂