Linux based VPS Hosting is one of the most widely used hosting type, owing to its Dedicated Hosting like features at a slightly more price than Shared Hosting. If your website is growing and Shared Hosting is proving to be inadequate, but on the other hand, Dedicated Hosting is exceeds your budgets, then VPS Hosting is the sweet spot.
While choosing VPS hosting, it is necessary to understand the core of Virtualization as it is the basis of VPS Hosting. If you get a better understand of that, you will be in a position to understand what to look for to improve VPS Hosting performance. This post is going to talk about why KVM Hypervisor is definitely something you should look to include in your VPS Hosting.
Let’s start with the basics. In layman terms, Server virtualization is a simulated environment above a host node, which enables efficient use of the hardware resources of the host node. When we talk about Virtualization in VPS hosting, it is primarily applied to three areas:
- Server Virtualization: Here, we basically mask the server resources in order to spare the user from having to understand and manage complicated details of server resources while increasing resource sharing and utilization and maintaining the capacity to expand later.
- Network Virtualization: What happens here is that the available network bandwidth is split into channels, each of which is independent from one other. This simulates the feel of having the full bandwidth made available to one user.
- Storage Virtualization: When you pool all the storage space from all available storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console; it is termed as storage virtualization.
Application of virtualization in the above areas makes VPS Hosting perform better, scale faster and cut down costs drastically.
Now that you know how virtualization helps VPS Hosting, let’s go one step higher and understand KVM. KVM stands for Kernel -based Virtualization. Kernel-based virtualization helps leverage the advantages of hardware assisted virtualization support given by the new generation of Intel and AMD CPUs by adding virtualization within the Linux kernel. By adding virtualization capabilities to a standard Linux kernel, the virtualized environment can benefit from all the ongoing work on the Linux kernel itself. What this means is that it overcomes the issue where CPUs earlier were completely governed by software and performance was lower because of the absence of direct hardware access. KVM enables the CPU to directly connect with hardware making things extremely fast.
Management of KVM to improve the overall system performance is made easy using the Hypervisor. A Hypervisor is nothing but a middle layer of a program, between the guest operating system and host systems hardware. It manages the actual hardware for all the connecting guest operating systems. The hypervisor drives the concept of virtualization by allowing the physical host machine to operate multiple virtual machines as guests to help maximize the effective use of computing resources such as memory, network bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Not only does KVM help improve the speed and scalability of your hosting environment, it also provides higher security. This is because it comes with MAC (Mandatory Access Control). Mandatory access control (MAC) is a security strategy that restricts the ability individual resource owners have to grant or deny access to resource objects in a file system. MAC criterias are defined by the system administrator, strictly enforced by the Operating System (OS) or security kernel, and are unable to be altered by end users.
So if you are looking for super-fast, highly scalable and extremely secure VPS hosting, definitely ask for KVM Hypervisor integrated VPS Hosting. Some of the well-known VPS Hosting providers provide this in their VPS Hosting plans, making them a great place to start your search at. Hope this helps and please feel free to share your questions or thoughts in the comments section below!