The Microsoft implementation of Virtual Technology is all Windows, and has proved immensely compatible and reliable. ICO has been offering Microsoft Virtual Dedicated Servers since November 2004, so we have a lot of experience with the technology and were the first web hosting company in the world to offer it.
A Microsoft Virtual Dedicated Server is not like, for instance, a Virtual Private Server, where a single operating system is essentially chopped into little bits.
In the far more elegant, stable and secure Microsoft implementation, there is an underlying piece of hardware. It doesn’t particularly matter what this hardware is, because it will be presented to all the Virtual Dedicated Server Operating Systems as a standard configuration.
Hardware and O/S
At ICO, we try and get the most bang for the buck, so these days the underlying server has 2 x QuadCore processors and 16 Gigabytes of RAM. On this server goes the Windows Virtualisation technology.
Then, on top of this, we install a separate operating system for each customer (not always the same operating system). Because this is a true operating system, you are the administrator of the server. You access the server via Remote Desktop.
Each server has a dedicated memory space, either 256 MB or 512 MB. And before you laugh at 256MB as being too small, you must read the comment below from one of our first and longest-term VDS users, a professional developer using the VDS to host multiple sites.
“In general we tested some badly designed complex SQL that took around 30 seconds to complete (multiple joins on varchars and multiple sub queries). We compared the times on the Virtual Dedicated Server against the time on our in-house Dual Xeon box (2.8 Ghz 1MB cache, 800fsb, 2GB RAM, also a domain controller) and found that the time required to execute a single SQL query was slightly better on the virtual server (0-5% better). We also queued up the SQL using a multi-threaded ASP.NET application and apart from the obvious effect of the dual CPUs the virtual server performed just as well as the in-house server, it just took twice as long. Most of our testing was aimed at the SQL Server side of things (accessed through IIS) because we considered the SQL load as far bigger than the IIS load for our applications.”
Steve Ransome
Creative Software
Security and Reliability
In the Virtual Dedicated Server, the hard drives are separated, the RAM is separated and the only shared component is the CPU. But because there are only a few users, the CPU is rarely used simultaneously.
The VDS is backed up completely every night and we keep three days of backups.
All of this means that the VDS is a very secure and reliable platform that can offer you and your clients great advantages at a very reasonable cost.
We’d like you to call us and talk over your specific needs. The configuration outlined above is just one of the technologically advanced solutions that ICO can offer.
Please call us on our free number, 1 300 727 733 or email us at service@ico.com.au