VMware Virtual Dedicated Servers - Ultimate Scalability
ICO Virtual Dedicated Servers are the serious alternative to ‘premier’ shared hosting plans.
A VMware Virtual Dedicated Server is not like, for instance, a Virtual Private Server, where a single operating system is essentially chopped into little bits.
In the far more elegant, stable and secure VMware implementation, there is an underlying piece of hardware. It doesn’t particularly matter what this hardware is, because it will be presented to all the Virtual Dedicated Server Operating Systems as a standard configuration.
VMware Virtual Dedicated Servers provide you with all the flexibility of having your own Dedicated Server, at about half the price, and with all the benefits of auto failover and redundancy built in. They are a great advanced hosting starting point, offering features you won’t find on a standard Dedicated Server.
- Your own, real, Windows 2003 or 2008 Server operating system or Red Hat Linux operating system
- Secure virtual dedicated memory space - 512MB
- 10 GB virtual dedicated hard drive
- Full and complete control (NO ‘Control Panels’)
- Your own MSSQL or MySQL database installed by default
- Manage all your own settings from security to services. Install what you want.
- Use Remote Desktop or SSH for secure access and control. You are the administrator.
- Manage your own IIS
- DNS and backup DNS services included
- 20 basic email accounts included or
- Run your own Mail Server
- Backup mail server included
- ‘Live Person’ instant phone support (NO ‘Trouble Ticket System’)
- 24x7 live person emergency support
- Windows 2003 and ASP.NET 2.0 specialist support
- Red Hat Linux specialist support (RHCE/RHCT)
- Australia's best high uptime data centre
- Your choice of .NET Frameworks
- Premium Bandwidth. Every Virtual gets a minimum of 1Mbps to itself (not shared) on our 1 Gigabit link.
- Low premium data rates. No ratios. No penalties. No surprises.
Optional services are available: Daily Managed Backups, SAN Backup space etc. Please ask for details.
RAM and Hard Disk can be scaled to your exact requirements - Please ask for pricing.
One-time setup fee includes database software install $275.
Setup fee waived when VDS management package taken.
Hardware and O/S
At ICO, we try and get the most bang for the buck, so these days the underlying server has 2 x QuadCore processors and 32 GB of RAM. On this server goes the VMware virtualization technology. Then, on top of this, we install a separate operating system for each customer (not always the same operating system). Because this is a true operating system, you are the administrator of the server. You access the server via Remote Desktop (MS) or SSH (Linux Red Hat).
Each server has a dedicated memory space, starting from 512 MB and moving up to 16GB. And before you laugh at 512 MB as being too small, you must read the comment below from one of our first and longest-term VDS users, a professional developer using the VDS to host multiple sites.
“In general we tested some badly designed complex SQL that took around 30 seconds to complete (multiple joins on varchars and multiple sub queries). We compared the times on the Virtual Dedicated Server against the time on our in-house Dual Xeon box (2.8 Ghz 1MB cache, 800fsb, 2GB RAM, also a domain controller) and found that the time required to execute a single SQL query was slightly better on the virtual server (0-5% better). We also queued up the SQL using a multi-threaded ASP.NET application and apart from the obvious effect of the dual CPUs the virtual server performed just as well as the in-house server, it just took twice as long. Most of our testing was aimed at the SQL Server side of things (accessed through IIS) because we considered the SQL load as far bigger than the IIS load for our applications.”
Steve Ransome Creative Software
