Are Cloud Servers just a VPS?

What does VPS stand for?

Firstly, it’s important to consider what VPS actually stands for – it stands for Virtual Private Server. It’s a term that goes back to the beginnings of the internet when “cloud server” was a term that hadn’t even been heard of by people in the tech industry, let alone CIOs and the public at large.

VPS were just a way that hosting providers could get you a server that you could call your own. The server was segregated up into a set of smaller servers underneath to make maximum use of the available hardware.

VPS Advantages

These VPS systems were good at the time, as you could do lots with them: backup and transfer your system elsewhere; or, manage your own file system. As such these systems were more commonly known as “rooted” systems – ie. You had your own “shell” in someone else’s large server that you could load your own PHP modules onto for example.

VPS Disadvantages

However, because there were no distributed resources, or shared file systems, these VPS had limited high availability. Moreover, if anything went wrong with the VPS from the power supply, hard drive, CPU or memory of that system, to the switch in that cabinet, to the edge router on that network or the DC going dark, your system would be out and that would be it.

No, Cloud Servers are NOT just a VPS

Cloud servers today get over all of those issues by actually operating intelligently. And with the advent of big software vendors such as VMware and Citrix, high availability and enterprise performance are now the de facto cloud server standard. So how have these been made better than the old VPS systems I hear you ask? Simple: time, effort and energy and a sprinkling of innovation have been put into eliminating all the single points of failure that old VPS systems had.

Nowadays modern cloud servers offer a much more resilient solution. No, cloud servers are not just a VPS. They are a more scalable, secure, reliable, cost effective solution.