Comparison between Dedicated Server and Virtual Machine

Have you been looking to grow your business? Does that require a server with the capacity to scale your business?

In an office, desktop run businesses have limitations of backup that can only be held within the office ecosystem and growth demands monetary investment each time. Then there is also support, lag, security like measures that affect the performance This is not an effective solution in terms of success matrix. Thus, every organisation is in need of an infrastructure that can bear the flow of work without crashing or lag.

This makes it essential to choose the right server. There is the option of Dedicated Server or Virtual Machine among which a business must pick the one that allows maximum scalability. To determine the suitable server, compare the features of both servers.

A Virtual Machine is a private space in the server’s cloud with shared physical resources like CPU, RAM and so on. Multiple virtual machines can share the cloud space of a server. In such a case, one user can hold multiple servers within a system or multiple users can share the virtual space. There is no interference due to balanced allocation of space and capacity optimization.

A Dedicated Server is a private server in terms of hardware and software. The complete system belongs to the user. The entire virtual space is dedicated to a single hardware unit which is owned by a single user. One user, one server without any shared resources.

On a basic level, the two servers differ in their cloud settings. Digging deeper reveals that this basic difference can cause many variations in terms of cost, security, scalability, accessibility and the overall performance of the server.

Monetary factor plays a huge part in the decision making process of a user. Any business, blogger or organization looking for cloud options first decides their budget based on the growth rate. This is where Virtual Machines differ from Dedicated Servers

The former having shared physical resources charges principally for the private virtual allocations while the latter costs higher for the exclusive availability of hardware to a user.

Despite the cost difference between Dedicated Servers and Virtual Machines, a user always picks the best option based on a server’s ability to accommodate growth, either increasing or decreasing.

Dedicated Servers have more capacity to hold data and information because of the private hardware but in case of extra storage requirement, a user will have to bear the high cost of buying additional hardware as well as bearing with configurations for the new system. On the other hand, scaling a business in virtual machines is a simpler process of single click as multiple units can be held within the single server but each unit has certain capacity for expansion since the physical server is shared by other virtual machine users as well.

If a business is scaling up, Dedicated Servers are preferable but if they wish to scale down, virtual machines are more cost effective.

Talking about resource ownership, when it comes to security, Dedicated servers have a certain edge over Virtual Machines as they have no shared space whatsoever. Just the thought of shared virtual space has a certain vulnerability attached.

However, there is another angle to it. Virtual Machines are like container units within a system where a single failure or attack will be contained within the unit instead of affecting the whole system whereas one crash in a dedicated server environment will impact everything in the system.

Thankfully, service providers take complete care and responsibility to keep every kind of server, they provide, completely secure.

Backup facilities provided by server hosting companies these days are impeccable but there are certain things even they can’t do anything about. After every inch of the cloud hosted business has been backed up, a failure occurs; will recovery be quick enough to evaporate downtime?

With Virtual Machines, a crash will not affect the other virtual machines in the shared resource environment, Moreover the saved backup which was already in place helps the user bounce right back to their machines and continue work. Then there is Dedicated Server which requires the entire system to be re-configured in order to get back to work.

Obviously, Virtual Machines have a faster recovery process than Dedicated Servers minimizing downtime.

Performance is indicated by the uninterrupted run of a business, irrespective of glitches like load, space, traffic and lag. How quickly can the server overcome these hiccups? A Large space solves all these problems. The power of exclusive CPU, memory, storage and other features related to hardware give Dedicated Server an edge over Virtual Machines in the performance sector.

Thus, many small and medium businesses often end up choosing the higher cost of Dedicated servers and yet do not use the server to complete capacity resulting in poor space optimisation. Alternatively any negative impact on the system will affect the complete software and hardware resulting in monetary loss of a business, thus degrading the performance.

Instead of choosing a server based on private ownership, pick out the requirements like higher security, scope of growth within 2 to 5 years or 5 to 10 years, backup options, urgency of recovery in relation to monetary loss and finally the ability to elevate customer experience by removing possibility of glitches and crashes. These factors help in choosing the best server for any user.

Comparing all the features of a server between Dedicated server and Virtual machine determines that large companies working with multiple branches across the map, businesses which encounter large traffic or companies dealing in monetary trades, gaming platforms or e-commerce should opt for dedicated servers for better load handling.

Whereas small to medium size business, even the ones with exponential growth potential can easily work with a virtual machine. Virtual machines allow easy portability which can help in upgrading servers in the future. This also helps these businesses in saving server cost with the independence of uninterrupted private virtual space.

Since we are on this topic, you might find it useful to know the advantages of Windows Dedicated server over Linux dedicated server.