Physical Servers vs. Offsite Virtual Hosted Servers

Your company's infrastructure depends heavily on the servers that you use. Servers store all of your company's essential information, from customer and employee data to sensitive sales and marketing information. When it comes to choosing a server for your business, there are two main options - a physical server or an offsite virtual hosted server.

Choosing which one suits your business best depends on your specific needs and budget. The following compares the pros and cons of each type of server to help you decide which option will work best for you:

Physical Servers

A physical server is a piece of equipment that's generally stored onsite in a server room or data center. The following are a few of the pros and cons for using a physical server:

The Pros of Using Physical Servers

• Physical servers are typically easier to maintain. Your staff won't require a specific skillset in order to manage and maintain your physical server.
• You may have certain applications that require dedicated processing power in order to function at an optimal level. Physical servers don't share processors, which means that they are better suited for such applications.
• A physical server can be fully customized and configured to meet your unique specifications and requirements.
• You'll have instant access to your server 24/7, which can be highly beneficial in the event of business critical or high demand operations.

The Cons of Using Physical Servers

• If maintenance on your physical server is required, you'll need to plan for downtime.
• You'll need more space, more power and more cooling to properly and safely store your network on a physical server.
• The purchase, maintenance and potential replacement (in case of failure) costs of a physical server are more expensive than that of a virtual server.
• Once you've reached a maximum workload, you won't be able to scale storage in small increments.

Offsite Virtual Hosted Servers

Offsite hosted servers or virtualized servers share hardware and software resources with other operating systems. Because they are cost-effective and provide faster resource control, virtual servers are popular in web hosting environments. The following are some of the pros and cons of using a virtual server:

The Pros of Off-site Virtual Hosted Servers

• Because you don't have to purchase physical hardware, there are fewer upfront costs.
• You won't have to have as big of an in-house IT staff in order to maintain a physical server.
• With a physical server, you'll need to purchase new hardware every time you need a new server. Off-site virtual hosted servers are more scalable and allow you to simply sign up with a new server, which costs less money and takes less time.
• An off-site physical server can host multiple virtual servers. This means you can get more out of a single host than you could out of a physical server, which typically only runs at 25 percent capacity.
• If a host server requires maintenance, your virtual server can simply be moved to a new host. This means that there's no downtime for maintenance.
• Your data is much easier to recover in a virtual environment in the event that the host server fails.

The Cons of Off-site Virtual Hosted Servers

• Hosted servers are more complex than physical servers, which means that your IT team will need to have specialized skills in order to maintain your server.
• You won't be independently in control of your server or the applications running on them as you would with a physical server.
• Even though your upfront costs won't be as expensive as with a physical server, a virtual server requires higher monthly costs.

These are some of the pros and cons of both physical and off-site virtual hosted servers that you should compare before making a decision. If you’d like more information, speak to the experts at Source Tech.