What is a virtual server? Website owners who are looking for hosting for their pages have three basic options. They can choose to use a shared server, a dedicated hosting service, or virtual server hosting. Shared and dedicated servers are fairly self-explanatory, but virtual dedicated servers are a bit more ambiguous.

Virtual Server Hosting & How It Works

Just what is virtual server hosting? In a shared server situation, many users share the same server (very easily over a hundred users). Each user is assigned a certain amount of disk space on the shared server however; The data port (and Ethernet card that lets data flow between the Internet and the web server) and both the RAM and CPU usage on that computer are free game. This is an ideal situation for beginners in the field of web design, but when a website begins to get a lot of traffic, the system resources can get eaten up rather quickly and if you have out of 100 users just two that have a very busy site you may find your own site slow to load or even in extreme cases unavailable.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a dedicated server is a server that is used just for one customer's website or set of websites. There is no limit on the amount of CPU usage, other than the physical limit of the machine itself. This is the most expensive way to host a website and is often the choice of a busy website that needs their own server or large corporations that expect high traffic on their sites.

A virtual dedicated server is a combination of the two. It takes one server and breaks it into several virtual machines and is nearly a dedicated server. While technically the user is sharing the server with other users, it sets up what appears to be a dedicated unit. The physical machine is shared, but the users are not affected by the actions of the other users and appear to be on a unique server to outside observers. In other words, a virtual server is a server that looks and acts like a dedicated server, but in reality shares a physical machine with other clients.  This becomes a cost effective way to host a website while eliminating the problems that can come from a shared server.

What is contended vs un-contended?

Contended is the cheapest option and is what most other hosts provide, this is where you do not get a dedicated CPU, instead the CPU and sometimes memory is shared among all the Virtual Servers on the machine on a first come first served basis. This means that you may have limited resources and poor performance as you have no idea how many other VSP's may be on the machine and sharing the CPU with you and thus the performance of your web application may suffer considerably at busy times or permanently if there are too many other virtual machines fighting for it..

Un-contended is the better option and is what we recommend for high availability and resource hungry applications. This gives you a dedicated 1 or more CPU cores and thus a guaranteed service level as no other VPS will be able to use your dedicated CPU cores. This also limits the number of virtual machines per physical server resulting in better overall performance and reliability. Typical usage is web application server, database server, mail server.

We do also provide the cheaper contended solution, we however have a very small 1:3 contention ratio, this means that no more than 3 VPS's will ever share the same CPU and you have a guaranteed availability of 33% burstable up to 100% depending on usage.
Contended (shared) is suitable for simple applications, low resource usage apps or as a backup or development server. Suggested uses include: basic web server, SMTP/post server. stats server, web development or source control server.

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So when we collect feedback from customers we always ask them if they will agree to be contacted for referral purposes. We don't want to post customers email addresses here to be harvested by spammers, so If you do wish to contact any of these customers for a referral, then please visit their web sites to find their contact details.

You can find more customer feedback dating all the way back to 2001 HERE.