Virtual Server FAQ
- Who uses Virtual Servers?
- What hardware does your Virtual Servers run on?
- Can I Upgrade/downgrade my Virtual Server?
- What sort of SLA do you provide?
- How are Virtual Servers different to VPS?
- How are Virtual Servers different to dedicated servers?
- Do you manage backups?
- What does OS updates cover?
- I need a large amount of disk space, can you offer a lower cost alternative to SAN?
- Do you provide load balancing and other advanced configurations?
- What level of access do you provide to servers?
- Can you provide a control panel?
1. Who uses Virtual Servers?
Virtual Servers are ideally suited to web sites that require a high-availabilty environment that can scale on demand. Many of New Zealand's most popular web sites are hosted on Web Drive Virtual Servers as well as numerous web hosting providers and web site design companies.
2. What hardware does your Virtual Servers run on?
Virtual Servers are hosted on high powered Blade servers and Fibre Channel SAN storage. Your Virtual Server is hardware independant and can hot swap to our redundant clustered Blade servers in the event of hardware failure.
3. Can I upgrade/downgrade my Virtual Server?
Yes, a key benefit of a Virtual Server is the ability to upgrade RAM, CPU and disk space on demand within minutes. Increase your resources for busy months and decrease for quieter times.
4. What Service Level Agreement do you offer?
Virtual Servers are an ultra high availability service we guarantee 99.99% monthly uptime and 24/7 emergency support with a 1 hour response. Please contact sales for our full SLA document.
5. How are Virtual Servers different to VPS or Virtual Private Servers?
Web Drive Virtual Servers are not like "VPS" such as Virtuozzo. Whilst these products sandbox a shared operating system only VMWare ESX gives you a true dedicated operating system. VPS environments are usually housed on a single piece of hardware with shared resources meaning your system performance can be effected by other VPS's. With ESX this is not possible as all Virtual Servers have dedicated resources and a private VLAN.
6. How are Virtual Servers different to a dedicated server?
With a dedicated server if a motherboard or other piece of hardware fails, it must be replaced leading to downtime or if you require additional processing power, RAM or disk space the server must be powered down and hardware installed. With a Virtual Server there is no hardware risk, if our hardware fails your server is hot-swapped to a redundant server with minimal downtime. If you require additional processing power, RAM or disk space we can simply increase your allocation with minimal downtime (CPU and disk space increases requires a server reboot).
7. Do you manage backups?
We provide daily managed offsite backups that take a full snapshot of your server including OS, configuration and data that is archived for 7 days. In the event your server needs to be restored we can start this process within minutes, rather than hours of FTP transfers or loading up tapes.
8. What does OS updates cover?
OS updates cover keeping your server operating system and related packages up-to-date. This does not extend to full server management, for pricing please contact sales@webdrive.co.nz.
9. I need a large amount of disk space, can you offer a lower cost alternative to SAN?
Yes, we can provide NAS (Network Attached Storage) disk space for $1 per GB. This data is backed up, however it does not offer as high-performance as the SAN.
10. Do you provide load balancing and other advanced configurations?
Yes, we can load balance multiple Virtual Servers as well as providing configuration such as dedicated SQL, web and file servers.
11. What level of access do you provide to servers?
Virtual Servers come with full root / administrator access.
12. Can you provide a control panel?
We can provide licensing for and install the Plesk control panel. If you prefer another control panel such as Cpanel you will need to purchase licensing direct from the vendor.