Virtual Hosting versus Dedicated Servers
Cloud Computing and Virtual Hosting have been popular buzzword in the local ICT market for a long time, and companies such as RSAWeb, Afrihost and Gamco are offering virtual server packages to the public at prices starting from as low as R256 per month for an entry-level service.
Competition in the virtual private server hosting market is going to get even more fierce with two big players, MWEB Business and Altech Technology Concepts, set to launch their virtual service offerings soon.
Not everyone is convinced that virtual servers are the way to go. DiaMatrix MD Wayne Diamond feels that from a financial and quality point of view, virtual private server (VPS) hosting does not make sense.
“We have found that VPS hosting isn’t viable in the current South African Market,” says Diamond.
Diamond explained that with the current costs related to good quality server hardware and the price of bandwidth in South Africa, the financial viability of VPS hosting will be forced into one of the following:
- Cheap and nasty hardware with little to no redundanc
- The over subscribing and overselling of the product on decent server hardware.
- Over charging to avoid the scenarios above
“We don’t believe that the options mentioned above will deliver a high quality product that we would be happy with or could put our name behind with pride,” said Diamond. “Currently there are a lot of discussions regarding VPS providers that are able to allocate ‘guaranteed’ resources. However, what end users don’t know is that all VPS software (VMware, Xeon, Virtuozzo) allows guaranteed resources allowance even when the service is over-subscribed,” said Diamond.
“This still leads to various forms of ‘neighbouring’ VPS performance issues because the host node tries to guarantee the over-subscribed resources to each of the VPSs.”
Diamond further highlighted that the international business model behind VPS hosting is “low profit margin, high turnover”.
“This means that you require a large subscriber base to make VPS hosting a lucrative option,” said Diamond.
“The concept of VPS hosting itself is fairly new to the South African market and the uptake on them is relatively slow, making it an unfeasible notion. We have also found that many South Africans are still hesitant to buy into the VPS concept and still prefer their own dedicated server.”
Diamond also questions the affordability of VPS hosting in South Africa. “We have found that our entry level dedicated servers (R820 per month) have been far more popular than our original VPS offering,” said Diamond.
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