SA Hosting: Virtual versus Dedicated Servers

Dedicated Servers is the whole pie, Virtual is like half the pie.

I have at least 7 dedis, dumped all of my virtual as the dedi's are getting that much cheaper these days(US/Euro/Hong-Kong servers). =]
 
"Diamond" has no clue what he is talking about YET also hit the nail right on the head when it comes to South African business mentality. "Lets oversubscribe these people on low-quality hardware and make MONEY!!!"

There are a multitude of reasons why anyone would want a VPS solution for their business. One of which is that they've outgrown the shared hosting environment (which ALSO gets over-subscribed constantly) and require direct access to their own OS for customized software packages (web apps these days are all the rage hey), better security *and* dedicated resources (unfortunately, like "Diamond" mentioned, the latter might be oversubscribed for profit)

Hardware isn't so expensive either and with a proper business plan in place you'd do quite well in the market. Hell, looking at how bandwidth pricing for hosting in South Africa has dropped in the last year even makes it WORTHWHILE to do everything locally. So I really don't know WTF "Diamond" is on about. As an example, Web Africa's dedicated hosting bandwidth went from 30gb allowance to 300gb allowance earlier this year with no price increase.

You'll also find it much more likely to get people to pay R500 for a VPS with a dedicated 2gb of RAM and fill up a 32gb RAM server quite easily WHILE making a profit and NOT oversubscribing. You just have to get your archaic "Me Tarzan, Me want profit" business plans out of the window and come up with new innovative ways to make more money while delivering quality service and servers to people.

Unrelated, but I have to point out when Afrihost started selling cheap bandwidth they shocked EVERYONE and EVERYONE said it was unsustainable. Look at where we are now with uncapped services from MWEB... it just takes one or two companies to shake things up a bit to get things going. South Africa is READY for VPS and Cloud services
 
VioAdmin said:
Dedicated Servers is the whole pie, Virtual is like half the pie.

I have at least 7 dedis, dumped all of my virtual as the dedi's are getting that much cheaper these days(US/Euro/Hong-Kong servers). =]
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Obviously you outgrew your VPS solutions

Shared Hosting < VPS < Dedicated

It scales in price. And not everyone (even with the cheap dedicated server pricing, which isn't a proper bladed solution FYI, probably a normal Tower one with RAID 1 _maybe_) can afford a dedicated server when their needs are still too small to justify one but outgrew the shared hosting environment.
 
I have been looking into this for our software business. We need direct access to the server.

Where we would use VPS is where we would buy a "silo" that we use for our clients (thus we can prevent oversubscribing of host hardware). we would simply make use of the providers VPS service to manage it on our behalf.
 
cloud and vps are different altogether, cloud-hosting can have unlimited resources while vps still often constitutes one machine divided up, while cloud hosting is many machines working together where you can have a slice of all the machines working together. which can be increased if the hosting company deems necessary

But a VPS can run on top of a cloud environment
 
We've just switched to Hetzner's CHS(Custom Hosting Solutions) environment... it's early days, but so far so good! For us the quality of service is far more important than the price alone... there are many inexpensive DEDI options in the SA market, but to keep the price down the ratio of admins to servers goes up and up and the quality of service is soon compromised!
 
Another moron who doesn't understand virtual computing...
 
He does not make enough money off virtual. So he goes against it. Virtual is awesome if done correctly with the right hardware and backend systems.

The train is leaving and this guy has not bought the ticket.
 
VPS solutions can be great if they meet your requirements. I upgraded to one a few months ago from shared hosting and wow is it nice. My sites don't need a dedicated server so why bother with one?
 
Actually, VPS hosting is only going to grow in South Africa. It is inevitable as bandwidth costs fall. It's all about the price of hardware and rackspace versus the price of bandwidth (and the cost of processing power too, I guess). In the past when bandwidth costs far outweighed hardware and rackspace costs, dedicated hosting made sense. The scale is tipping and the initial offerings from RSAWeb and others are just the beginning if local bandwidth costs continue to fall.
 
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People who have not seen Vmware in action does not know anything about virtualization! It is the bomb! 90% of the time you do not even utilize more than 20% of the resources of a server!
 
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ThinkCentre said:
People who have not seen Vmware in action does not know anything about virtualization! It is the bomb! 90% of the time you do not even utilize more than 20% of the resources of a server!
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Cant agree more!!!

I have about 1tb of hosted memory in my environment, and it grows about 10% every month. There are no small customers in this environment, only Enterprise customers that actually understand the dynamic of our solution. Who else will give you geo redundancy over 6 data centers? In fact, this will be 12 by the end of Q2, all in SA at that :-)

Another very important thing is that, customers that end of going with a dedicated or Virtual server with MWeb, Afrihost, WebAfrica, RSAweb, Hetzner etc etc etc often end up with a solution that boasts only consumer grade hardware ESPECIALLY storage. There is really no comparison between a SATA solution and a 15k rpm SAS 6g solution...

When I deliver benchmark results it usually ends in a signed deal :-)


In the same breath ill add that there is definitely a place for these SMB providers, I mean... who else will I get customers from ;-)


Anyways, VMWare > All
 
AcidRaZor said:
There are a multitude of reasons why anyone would want a VPS solution for their business. One of which is that they've outgrown the shared hosting environment (which ALSO gets over-subscribed constantly) and require direct access to their own OS for customized software packages (web apps these days are all the rage hey), better security *and* dedicated resources (unfortunately, like "Diamond" mentioned, the latter might be oversubscribed for profit)
Click to expand...

Just out of interest, please explain how it's better security and how you get "dedicated resources" on a VPS ?

Hardware isn't so expensive either and with a proper business plan in place you'd do quite well in the market. Hell, looking at how bandwidth pricing for hosting in South Africa has dropped in the last year even makes it WORTHWHILE to do everything locally. So I really don't know WTF "Diamond" is on about. As an example, Web Africa's dedicated hosting bandwidth went from 30gb allowance to 300gb allowance earlier this year with no price increase.
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Web africa is offsetting their incoming ADSL bandwidth against their outgoing 300GB dedicated server bandwidth. Nothing new here.

You'll also find it much more likely to get people to pay R500 for a VPS with a dedicated 2gb of RAM and fill up a 32gb RAM server quite easily WHILE making a profit and NOT oversubscribing. You just have to get your archaic "Me Tarzan, Me want profit" business plans out of the window and come up with new innovative ways to make more money while delivering quality service and servers to people.
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Please link me to a provider in South Africa who sells 2GB VPS's for R500?


Unrelated, but I have to point out when Afrihost started selling cheap bandwidth they shocked EVERYONE and EVERYONE said it was unsustainable. Look at where we are now with uncapped services from MWEB... it just takes one or two companies to shake things up a bit to get things going. South Africa is READY for VPS and Cloud services
Click to expand...

Just out of interest, I remember seeing adverts for VPS's at Diamatrix back in like 2007 (on virtuozzo if memory serves me right), they not new to VPS's.


Actually, VPS hosting is only going to grow in South Africa. It is inevitable as bandwidth costs fall. It's all about the price of hardware and rackspace versus the price of bandwidth (and the cost of processing power too, I guess). In the past when bandwidth costs far outweighed hardware and rackspace costs, dedicated hosting made sense. The scale is tipping and the initial offerings from RSAWeb and others are just the beginning if local bandwidth costs continue to fall.
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or you could just take out a dedicated server with VMware (lots of providers offer it) and run your own VPS's ?



EDIT: just reading over the comments again, i think a lot of people are misreading the article, "Mr Diamond" is not saying that VPS's are not a solution at all, he is saying that for their business it is not a viable, profitable solution in the current South African market without cutting corners and they not willing to cut corners to offer it as a solution.
 
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dotnerd said:
Another very important thing is that, customers that end of going with a dedicated or Virtual server with MWeb, Afrihost, WebAfrica, RSAweb, Hetzner etc etc etc often end up with a solution that boasts only consumer grade hardware ESPECIALLY storage. There is really no comparison between a SATA solution and a 15k rpm SAS 6g solution...
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That's fine for the corporates but how much does each virtual machine end up costing ? Those hosting companies sell to the cheapskate market.

If Wayne took his entry level server and split it into 3 parts (and divided the price by 2.5) he would be fine but I suspect he doesn't have the in house skills to manage that properly. A decent SAN and VMWare solution would make that easier but then his costs would go up again.
 
bridgetroll said:
If Wayne took his entry level server and split it into 3 parts (and divided the price by 2.5) he would be fine but I suspect he doesn't have the in house skills to manage that properly.
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And you would be 100% happy and feel secure knowing that your VPS was running of a single SATA hard drive with no redundancy at all? Sounds like cutting corners to me.
Also thinking about it, if they divided that server into 3 with no hardware additions, then those customers on that server would get roughly 640mb ram with no room or way of increasing it.
 
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I use rackspace Cloud Sites for smaller websites and Cloud servers for dedicated boxes. What I like about it is that it costs me per hour, and i can spool them up us as needed. If for example, i need a SQL server for 30 min, i spool it up have accsess and when finished i switch it off. and its cheaper than a dedi box. just my 2c
 
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