How the Cloud Enhances Your Dedicated Server?

Business has become extremely agile and now all business needs the flexibility of services they use.

What if you outgrow your current Virtual Private Servers (VPS)? You will need to decide whether if you need Flexibility of Cloud and and also the resources of a physical, dedicated server?

If you need hosting for:

• Resource-hungry websites & applications
• Multiple websites of all kinds
• Databases with or without the web server on the same server
• Solutions like ERP, CRM etc.

TDWS Cloud Servers provides a great solution worth considering. It is important for websites, applications, and platforms to be able to scale and have their hosting environments grow with them. Cloud services can do that, and more.

But what exactly is cloud?

The cloud is not a physical entity, but instead is a vast network of remote servers around the globe which are hooked together and meant to operate as a single ecosystem. These servers are designed to either store and manage data, run applications or deliver content or a service such as streaming videos, web mail, office productivity software or social media.

Microsoft Azure

There is a fundamental difference between VPS and Cloud. A VPS is a server that exists as a piece of software running on a host or parent server. A hypervisor is used to manage these virtual servers. Whereas with Cloud, it has a lot of moving parts like Storage, Network, etc. Lines between VPS and Cloud are pretty obscure. When it comes to TD Web Services, VPS are also deployed within the cloud. Hence, TDWS Cloud Servers, the ability to move server instances between servers without needing to migrate data or reconfigure the server settings.

What is a Dedicated Server?

Dedicated Server takes the cloud out of the equation and gives you the bare metal server. Your server environment is run directly off of the hardware with the operating system and all files directly installed on the server.

When your application is hosted on a dedicated servers – you are limited with capabilities of the server itself. Whereas with Cloud – you can be Elastic and only pay for the resources that you use, because Cloud uses a Cluster of dedicated servers.

How a Private Cloud Enhances a Dedicated Server

A Private Cloud is a Dedicated or Cluster Dedicated Servers running a layer virtualisation running on top.

The implementation for TDWS Private Cloud is similar to our TDWS Cloud Servers. With TD Web Services you will get a choice to choose your Vitulization:

• TDWS KVM Private Cloud
• TDWS Xen Private Cloud
• Microsoft Hyper-V Private Cloud
• VMware ESXi Private Cloud
• VMWare Public Cloud Servers

What this will allow the servers to have dynamic provisioning in a scalable, virtual environment. But instead of sharing the processor with other instances, you have the full use of the CPU and its cores.

In other words, Private Cloud Server combines the processing power and resources of a traditional dedicated server with the instant provisioning and flexibility of the cloud.

One potential drawback to dedicated servers is that moving to a new server involves migrating data. This can be a time-consuming process depending on the project(s) hosted on the server and the time it takes to migrate the data, test the data, and point the DNS. And with DNS propagation, your sites and apps can also see downtime.

TDWS Private Cloud makes this process seamless. Like the TDWS Cloud Servers or TDWS VPS, you are able to resize the bare metal server instance from one to the other without having to migrate data or change server settings. Aside from a couple of server reboots, there is not much downtime as there are no DNS changes to speak of. While it is not an instant process, you are still able to scale faster than with a full-on data migration.

Use Cases

There are a lot of cases where such a setup is useful. I am listing a few of them, but the list is infact endless.

Hosting Multiple Sites

A common requirement for various Digital Agencies is to provide dedicated resources for the different site or application rather than having all their clients in a single cPanel Dedicated Server. The primary reason for this is their clients will have different requirements in terms of traffic and resource utilization and to ensure optimal delivery of their solution.

Having such a setup also protect their bigger clients if there is a breach or a bad script in another clients area, which start the consumption of resources like CPU/RAM. Such incidences are restricted to a specific account.

Apart from such bottleneck, what we found in our survey that Agencies prefer Private Clouds, so they can resize their clients resources without having them to migrate to another server.

Database Hosting

We have clients and agencies who don’t want their DB Servers to be public facing. Which is why they need to get Dedicated Servers with a private network. So a whole server is dedicated to a DB and the CPU/cores that are not being can be used for other application. In one of the Private Cloud Setups what we did for our clients is provided them with a DB Virtual Server with a private network. Which means that DB Virtual Server within their private was NOT accessible from outside only with a private network setup within the Private Cloud Server.

Load Balancing

With an increased demand for reliable and performant infrastructures designed to serve critical systems, the terms scalability and high availability couldn’t be more popular. In computing, the term availability is used to describe the period of time when a service is available, as well as the time required by a system to respond to a request made by a user. High availability is a quality of a system or component that assures a high level of operational performance for a given period of time.

To eliminate single points of failure, each layer of your stack must be prepared for redundancy. For instance, imagine you have an infrastructure consisting of two identical, redundant web servers behind a load balancer. The traffic coming from clients will be equally distributed between the web servers, but if one of the servers goes down, the load balancer will redirect all traffic to the remaining online server.

The web server layer in this scenario is not a single point of failure because:

• redundant components for the same task are in place
• the mechanism on top of this layer (the load balancer) is able to detect failures in the components and adapt its behavior for a timely recovery

Redundancy alone cannot guarantee high availability. A mechanism must be in place for detecting failures and taking action when one of the components of your stack becomes unavailable. If you are looking for a High Availability Solutions, please get in touch with us, and our solutions experts will help you with the same.

Final thoughts

Once you have taken a plan for your Private Cloud, there are things you need to consider:

• Securing your server is paramount to ensuring your site and data remain protected. The extent of that security needs to be determined based on the amount of risk you plan to take versus the risk that your hosting provider will assume.
• Knowing who will be managing your server and the degree of management they provide is also an essential factor in choosing your server and provider. Decide up front whether the server will be handled by you, a developer, or your provider to determine responsibilities. You will want to plan to fill any gaps between the management you require and what can be given.
• Backups
  • On-server backups – Use your primary storage to keep backups taken by your control panel or other solutions of your choosing.
    
  • Remote backups – Use our Cloud Backups to store full server backups on our servers, managed by us for your disaster recovery needs.