Can someone explain to me how web hosting is associated to server virtualization

Gidoguy · May 5, 2016

I'm currently doing a project about emerging technologies, more specifically, Server virtualization. I need help from someone explaining to me the basics of web hosting on a virtual server.

Mikensan · May 5, 2016

Well, there's two things that come to mind when you say that. Apache has "virtual websites" wherein it can host multiple websites from a single instance, and based on the HTTP header direct traffic to the appropriate site/folder. This way you do not have to use a reverse proxy or alternate ports to host multiple sites from a single IP / session. The other is you could install a hypervisor on to the physical/metal server such as vmware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V etc.... This would allow you to raise multiple virtual servers within a single physical server keeping them isolated from one another. When you use a webhost such as namecheap / godaddy, the difference between "shared" and "VPC" is that above. The first scenario being "shared" and the second scenario via ESXi would offer up a VPC.

I guess the purpose of any website(s) being virtual is not requiring dedicated IP addresses per site, redundancy, security (if you isolate each site to their own machine/subnet with dedicated storage), cost savings (power consumption and hardware), and easy control.

KuJoe · May 5, 2016

In terms of web hosting, a virtual server and dedicated are basically the same thing in the eyes of the software and visitors. If you're running a few hundred websites the need of dedicated physical hardware is not as apparent. Personally, I've hosted over 1000 active websites on an Intel Atom 330 with 2GB of RAM without any issues, you can easily get a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with a lot more resources and much better performance/redundancy for dirt cheap these days. Currently I run a few web hosting companies (paid and free) of strictly VPSs without any issue (although I also own most of the hardware they are running on, virtualization makes life so much easier though).

Bacon8tor · May 5, 2016

2 hours ago, KuJoe said:

virtualization makes life so much easier though).

AGREED. thats all I have to say

May 6, 2016

13 hours ago, Gidoguy said:

I'm currently doing a project about emerging technologies, more specifically, Server virtualization. I need help from someone explaining to me the basics of web hosting on a virtual server.

Virtualisation means that you take your hardware and divide it up amongst logical machines. Eg you have a quad core CPU and 4GB of RAM. You then make 3 virtual machines within that each assigned 1 CPU core and 1GB of RAM.

From a networking perspecitive, these machines can either be assigned a physical NIC provided the hypervisor or rather the host machine has spare NIC's or otherwise you can create what is known as a virtual switch. This acts as an interconnect between the virtual machines and the physical host.

When you virtualize a host for a website, you're running a web server (Apache, Windows IIS) inside one of those virtual machines. Functionality is identical to that of a bare metal server.