Best Virtual Server Hosting

Virtual server Introduction

Virtual server or virtual machine is a kind of virtualization technologies used to devide a dedicated server into several virtual parts and each virtual server can have it's own OS and server space and everything to perform like an independent server system.

Virtual server is the future of the IT industry and already popularly used by thousands of service providers. In this article I'll introduce several main virtual server softwares and their service provider.

VMware – Vmware has the longest history in virtual server industry and is absolutely the leader. Vmware products are various from personal to business, either from workstation or professional hosting solutions, vmware has side by side technologies support. Vmware is mostly used personally for learning purpose. their desktop product "workstation" is the best choice for windows platform. Vmware has following core products for IT solution

VMware Workstation
VMware Infrastructure
VMware ESX Server
VMware VirtualCenter
VMware P2V Assistant

Virtuozzo – Virtuozzo is definitely the best virtualization software on windows server. 99% windows VPS providers are actually using it. Virtuozzo is produced by parallels company which is also offerring plesk hosting control panel. The best feature of virtuozzo is the powerful backup and less consumption of the host server resources. Since it's a virtualization of the host OS, the performance is the best among many other virtual server solutions.

Xen – An open sourced virtual server technology developed by Cambridge university. It's working under Linux environments and it's being attached to all linux distributions. With XEN, your host machine don't have to be very strong in order to running a virtual server. you can even deploy it under some pretty old equipments computer and the performance is still good.

Openvz – Openvz is another product from Parallels company, it's open sourced and widely used by many VPS hosting providers for it's high performance. you can even edit the kernel to customize the virtual server.

Virtuozzo vs Xen vs Openvz

If you're searching for a windows VPS server, virtuozzo is absolutely the primary choice since it has the highest performance on windows server. Here I'll mainly compare Xen and Openvz, because more and more people are trying linux VPS for the cheap price. When you search the web, there're many cheap linux vps plans. Here're some comparision between the linux vps technologies and help you find the correct vps provider.

Generally speaking, Xen and Openvz both have excellent performance from their source design. The difference is mainly reply on how does the hosting provider address their service.

For a Xen based virtual server, if you get 512MB memory then it is the actual ammount allocated from the host server. But for Openvz based virtual machine, all virtual machines are sharing the same memory! So if there's only few virtual servers on the host server, there's no performance difference, but almost all hosting providers are trying to max their profit and always deploy 3 times or more virtual servers on the same host server!

Now there's big difference between Xen and Openvz, the Xen based virtual server will encounter slowness but the Openvz based server will be shut down directly! So if you wish stability on a VPS, Xen based system is recommended. when there's no much virtual servers on host server, openvz based system has better performance but the situation almost doesn't exist.