January 09, 2003, 12:00 AM — Real estate used to be one of the most important factors in running a
business. The financial services company I worked for years ago was
located in San Francisco's "Tenderloin" district, a disagreeable section
of town where reputable companies never headquartered. When we moved to
the glitzy "financial district" into an office overlooking the bay, we
gained millions of dollars of business, sometimes just by virtue of
entertaining clients in our new luxurious offices. We looked successful,
therefore we became successful.
Real estate is still important, but not brick and mortar real estate.
Your virtual real estate is what determines your status as an e-commerce
enterprise, and what you are capable of accomplishing. You can have your
headquarters in the worst slums in town, but if you have a nice Web site
with good e-commerce facilities and connectivity through your extranet,
everybody will think you're a Fortune 1000 company.
The Web site, of course, must live somewhere. Its cyberspace home can
take the form of a shared space or a dedicated space. Shared hosting is
the low-budget approach, much like what you did in college when you
shared a house with ten other students. It saves money, and it's
adequate for many small businesses who don't really need the power of a
dedicated hosting solution. Shared hosting simply places your Web site
on a common server with several other companies' Web sites.
Dedicated hosting, on the other hand, is more costly, since it dedicates
a single server to your Web presence, and requires more in terms of
administration. You get more power, control, and space, and larger
businesses (and many midsize ones) use this approach.
The middle ground takes the form of the virtual private server (VPS), a
low-cost alternative that provides small and midsize businesses with
much of the same power enjoyed by larger corporations with dedicated
solutions. The VPS works like a stand-alone server, even though multiple
VPSs run on a single system. The user of the VPS gets a lot of things
you don't get with a shared hosting solution, like full root access,
application services, and quality of service guarantees. Although the
VPS shares the same physical server with other VPSs, each VPS still has
its own unique file system. The virtual nature of the VPS isolates it
from any performance impact that may otherwise filter over from other
presences running on the same physical server. If another VPS is
experiencing heavy traffic or CPU load, it will not have any impact on
other private servers on the same box. Each VPS also has its own set of
IP addresses.
Price-wise, it's only a little more than a shared service, but a lot
less than a dedicated service. There are still only a handful of
providers. USonyx (http://www.usonyx.com) offers Linux-based VPS plans
with a good set of applications, services, support and tools. USonyx
partnered with SWsoft to create the offering, using Virtuozzo
(http://www.virtuozzo.com) technology. Virtuozzo takes the old concept
of creating partitions on mainframes to create virtual environments, and
expands it onto Intel-based hardware. As a result, the new virtual
environment gets mainframe-style features, including security,
performance isolation, and scalability.
