Cloud deployment and Dedicated servers

Dedicated Server and Cloud Servers

There’s a lot of confusion around dedicated servers vs cloud servers and it’s easy to see why. Which is more budget-friendly for your applications? Is one more outdated and the other cutting-edge? Do dedicated servers or cloud servers provide better performance? What are their similarities and differences? Can you compare them apples-to-apples or is it an apples-to-oranges scenario?

In this article, I’ll explain what a dedicated server is in comparison to cloud servers. I’ll also look at the features and benefits of each. By the end of this article, you should have a clear picture of which type of infrastructure is right for your application or applications. Let’s get started…

When and Why You Need a Server?

When running applications such as websites, mobile apps, or enterprise software, you need it hosted on a device somewhere, right? It could be a simple web hosting plan, servers hosted on-premise, dedicated server in a data center, or a virtualized server in the cloud. Wherever it’s hosted, you need four things – availability, reliability, durability, and performance. It should also make sense from a cost perspective.

Sure, you could always select a traditional web hosting plan from a provider like GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, or others. They’re a dime a dozen these days and plans start at just a couple dollars a month. That’s great if you’re just starting out. Maybe you’re running a blog or have a simple WordPress website. You might have a few hundred or even thousands of visitors. The point here is that you have a simple website that gets decent traffic. For this, a traditional web host is great!

Let’s say that you have a growing website, application, or mobile app that sees huge surges in visitor traffic and requires lots of computing power to handle performance demands such as load speed, graphics rendering, video, and databases. Another sign that it’s time for an upgrade is when your bandwidth and internet connection are slowing down performance or making your site unavailable to some users, aka the dreaded – this website is not available message. It’s beyond time to upgrade.

So, where do you start? How do you determine whether a dedicated server or cloud server is best for your applications? There are a lot of considerations – price, location, compute power, available storage, bandwidth, and management.

Cloud Server

Cloud ServersCloud Servers have a number of compelling benefits revoling around flexibility that can help improve your organization’s productivity.

Improved Business Agility and Cost Control:: th the recent economic recession, many businesses found themselves locked into expensive, long term hosting contracts for equipment that they no longer needed. With a cloud-based infrastructure, you’re able to add and remove servers as needed very quickly. You’re able to deploy new servers as you need them, when you need them. Then when you no longer need them, you’re able to dispose of them and no longer pay for them.

Reduced Downtime through Fault Tolerance: The biggest concern when deploying a dedicated server is that should that dedicated server experience an outage, your business will be offline. To offset for this, businesses frequently deploy expensive load balanced clusters. With Applied Innovations, we utilize Enterprise SAN storage from Dell Equallogic and although it’s more expensive to deploy, we believe the increased fault tolerance is worth the investment. Should the hardware node your cloud infrastructure is hosted on crash, your workload will automatically recover on another hardware node, resulting in almost no downtime.

Future-Proof Hardware: Cloud Computing is based on a virtualized compute environment. Multiple virtual server instances run on top of dedicated hardware nodes. The actual server you’re presented with is abstracted from the hardware and runs independent of the hardware configuration under it. With a cloud based solution as new hardware is made available the virtual server instances can be migrated from their existing hardware to the new hardware ‘as-is and intact’ without any of the headaches and time consuming, costly migration pains of a dedicated server migration. It’s literally, a couple button clicks, maybe a reboot or two and your server now resides on the latest hardware and is able to take advantage of that new performance.

Dedicated Servers

Icon_wordpress_Shared_HostingOn the surface, it may seem that cloud servers are the ideal platform for all workloads when in fact, cloud servers are the ideal platform for ‘most’ workloads.

High-Performance Processing: For workloads that are extremely CPU intensive, we may recommend a Dedicated Server or load balancing the web frontend across multiple cloud servers or a hybrid hosting solution that uses cloud servers for the web workload and dedicated application servers for the database workload.

What are cloud dedicated servers?

A dedicated cloud is a single-tenant cloud infrastructure, which essentially acts as an isolated, single-tenant public cloud. Dedicated clouds are set as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and are made to reduce an organization’s downtime and cost while promoting flexibility and performance.

Why Dedicated servers for the cloud?

When using a dedicated server, you can choose to split the server up into segments. You even have the option to share it with others, use the entire server for a single website, or split it between a couple of your own websites.

Dedicated servers can also be split into a number of smaller accounts. Doing this can help users have a web hosting account while being in a collective, making it affordable.

Why Use Cloud and Dedicated Servers?

Customization
Both cloud and dedicated services can now be deployed in minutes. Dedicated environments provide the ability to fully customize servers — an option that is non-existent in most clouds.

Security & Compliance
Cloud is multi-tenant and dedicated is single-tenant. It’s important to understand whether your business’s security plan requires a single-tenant environment.

Access to Tools
Cloud and dedicated environments are both available with utility-based pricing models. When looking beyond pricing models, cloud allows for easy compartmentalization of resources that are often expensive with dedicated hardware.

Flexible Pricing
In a cloud environment, community-driven APIs are often available for automatic scaling, provisioning and management. In a dedicated environment, you may have to wait for vendor-driven development.

Why CyberCure for Cloud deployment and dedicated servers?

Cybercure’s cloud hosting technology provides maximum network uptime and guarantees no single point of failure. As it is a system of interconnected servers so if at any point, one server is unable to take your request then another one out of the multiple servers will take over the workload of the failed server by default.

Feel free to get in touch.