So many companies have already announced "the future of Web hosting" that searching for "the future of web hosting" on Google returns 109,000,000 results - a pretty large result for something that is yet to exist.
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There is, however, an emerging technology for Web hosting that will eventually open opportunity for new Web hosting business in an extremely profitable niche market.
Virtual private servers represent a hot niche right now, but even they are evolving. Why settle for a part of a server in a software capsule if you can have a dedicated server for a very affordable price?
This past summer VMware (vmware.com) released the newest version of its ESX server product - called VMware Infrastructure (or version 3.0 of ESX). The product runs as a very small Linux server OS, enabling Web hosts to operate virtual machines with any kind of operating system. The product's selling points are its ease of administration, high availability, dedicated resources for each client and automation, among other things.
For Web hosts, in particular, the value in VMware is much the same as the value to be found in the practice of overselling shared hosting. Ninety percent of the time, servers will not use all the resources they have been assigned. Virtual servers share the host hardware with regard to memory, CPU and network. But they are assigned dedicated disk space. In a production environment, under normal circumstances, a moderately powered server can host from 10 to 20 virtual machines. That can mean significant savings for a Web host that has to pay for power, cooling and rack space.
Imagine that 2U physical server holding 10 virtual servers for customers. Even if you use only 1U per server you would have to use 10U of rack space to get those 10 servers online. A new 2U server from Dell or HP can provide enough memory, CPU, and disk space to provide resources for 10 dedicated virtual servers.
Calculation (high level):
Physical Server cost: $12,000.00
Cost per month (36 months): $333.33
2U Rack space w. Bandwidth/Power per month: $700.00
Total Cost: $1,033.33 per month
Sales Price Virtual Server (moderately equipped):
$200.00 per month x 10 VMs = $2,000.00 / month
That makes for a very nice margin that leaves room for some extra expenses such as system administration. And a single physical server will produce significantly fewer hardware problems than 10 servers would.
For clients leasing a server, the difference between leasing a physical dedicated server and a dedicated virtual server is almost invisible. They get the same resources and the same environment.
Of course this calculation leaves out quite a few things, but it is a very high level exercise designed to give you an idea of how Web hosting might look using VMware Infrastructure as your server platform. Using VMware for Web hosting on a single server is very shortsighted and expensive. The benefits really start kicking in when used in a (small) farm setup with several physical hosts and NAS or SAN storage.
Imagine a rack filled with 10 physical 2U servers, 2 NAS appliances, a large switch, and a firewall device providing a platform for 150-200 virtual servers with storage and backup to NAS (that's what the second NAS appliance is for). Yes, this will require a large investment, but the ROI can be tremendous. You can sell physical-class virtual servers for physical-class prices on a fraction of the footprint it would take going physical all the way. Imagine the reduction in hardware and support cost of purchasing 10 servers instead of 150. Imagine leasing a single rack with a nice bandwidth package and compare it to the expense of leasing several racks to provide the same platform.
Now let's have a look at some of the functionality of VMWare and what it can do for you. The software's VMotion functionality allows you to hot migrate a virtual server from one host to another without any interruption for the customer. Suppose you experience a hardware problem on one of your physical servers and need to power it down for maintenance. It happens to physical machines and usually affects one server and one customer. Instead of shutting down the virtual machines, you can "vmotion" the VMs to another host without any interruption of service for the customer, replace the hardware and move the machines back to the server.
Suppose one of your customers' Web sites becomes extremely popular after being mentioned on the news. The site is flooded with traffic. The traffic would probably kill a small physical server and take the site down. With VMware you allocate more resources to the machine, making it able to handle the traffic. If not enough resources remain on the host server, migrate some less resource intensive instances off to another host to free up resources.
Every once in a while, hardware dies and takes down an entire server. It can take hours to have the server hardware replaced and to bring it back up. If this happens to a VMware host, it can affect a greater number of customers. But with preset rules and procedures in place, VMware Infrastructure sees the host down, grabs the virtual machines and powers them back on - on the remaining physical hosts in your farm. Downtime for the customer is just a few minutes.
In the farm approach the virtual machine hard drives are stored on the NAS or SAN - accessible from all physical machines. If a host goes down the virtual machine hard drives are accessible from another host and VMware will bring up the virtual machineon a different host automatically and connect to the virtual hard drive. The key is to share the resources across the board and to provide sufficient internal connectivity so that resources can be accessed from anywhere within the farm.
The initial setup of a VM farm requires a significant investment. The savings in hardware and administrative work however will pay for this investment very fast. The ROI is tremendous and significantly higher compared to deploying physical servers and renting them out.
