VPS is known as one of the most secure and reliable forms of hosting out there; needless to say it’s also one of the costliest affairs, but big enterprises always need something that is secure, reliable and a robust solution that can not only keep their data confidential, but also seamlessly run round-the-clock without any hiccups. When we talk about virtual server hosting, Windows platform is one of the most popular ones. Yes, it is true that setting up a Windows server can be a costly affair, but there are many big companies and businesses out there that specifically need Windows VPS hosting solutions. So, starting up with Windows VPS hosting, as a host, is definitely not a bad idea.
Windows on VPS Servers
To make Windows run on VPS, you would require two kinds of virtualization technologies. The first one is XEN, which is normally used in making completely virtualized VPS platforms, and the other one is Hyper-V, which is a special kind of virtualization system developed by Microsoft to run Windows VPS servers.
XEN technology allows you to create and fully manage virtual servers by keeping them isolated from other similar servers, while still using the same set of hardware by different kernels. Every completely virtualized environment will keep the systems with its respective kernel, which addresses to the next layer of virtualized hardware.
Hyper-V, on the other hand, is a lesser known technology. It actually is a hypervisor, which works as per partitioning in which there is one parent partition that can access hardware and is capable of creating child partitions. These child partitions then host all the guest OSs within a virtual environment, which again is something similar to XEN and its different interfaces. On the other hand, a closer look tells that Hyper-V is nothing but a version of Windows Server 2008 core installation that also has virtualization support. This support makes it appear like OpenVZ, which makes use of different modifications of Linux Kernel. So, it is only fair to call it a combination of two different technologies.
What Makes Windows VPS Popular?
Windows VPS has been a ground-breaking solution in many ways; especially for the customers who need Windows hosting, but find it tough to afford a dedicated server , and find it even tougher to manage with glitches in shared hosting. Using Windows as OS for your server, and namely for website hosting requirements is really troublesome. Resources used initially, are much higher in Windows in comparison to Linux; disk subsystem and disk policies are far complex and only either a control panel or RDP can help in providing complete functional access.
To overcome all these issues, the hosting service providers are offering VPS solutions, as a result of which, customers get access to powerful servers with higher RAM that’s not available on shared hosting; this in turn allows proper delegation of resources… Then there is something called virtual disk partitioning + RAID hard disk arrays that helps in minimizing I/O loads and increasing the speed of simpler, but more important tasks of read/write. To top it all, you can also allows customers to manage their own servers through “Administrator” access that’s possible with Windows VPS.
Of course, if you’re trying to promote Windows VPS services as a host, you must target the enterprise users and organizations that make use of Windows platform for development and deployment of all their web applications. But, if you’re looking to provide low cost VPS hosting packages, then you should rather consider Linux. And, your target audience should also change, and instead of looking at enterprise users, you should focus on small start-ups, and individual customers, and business owners who don’t have extensive requirements.