You should be in India if you have got anything at all to do with hosting. There is not one single web hosting company in the US that doesnt have something to do with India. Be it backend support, server monitoring, billing assitance or anything at all, companies would have tied up with someone in India for help.

So, if you happen to be running such a company in India, what is most suitable for you for internet connectivity? One major problem in India are frequent powercuts. The Electricity department is not good anywhere throughout the country. Corruption, and non maintenance of cables are the only reason. But this situation is changing in several parts of the country. Then again you have got UPS systems installed, if you are in serious business. So power is not something that we  should be worrying about.

BSNL provides you with the worst of services Never go for them. Airtel has got their own trans oceanic cable laid from Chennai to Singapore, so their service is supposed to be very good. Tata Indicom, formerly VSNL too has a good line that is connecting directly somewhere, but there are disruptions in the service. Never make the mistake of getting a connection from Relianc, Hathway is good, but DNS problems occur often.

You need to choose between a leased line and a broad band connection and the data transfer volume that you would require, which would depend on the number of PCs that you might be having at your facility. Instead of getting 1 single 2 Mbps line, you could go for 10×256 kbps lines, which might cost you a bit more, but you will have consistency of data flow to systems without any breakage.

Remember that you would be using a lot of server software to connect to and to monitor remote servers. You need lots and lots of data transfer limit, and a limited 2 Mbps connection would never suffice.

A fully dedicated server has got a lot of resources that it can be shared amoung so many sites. But certain clients do not wish to let their sites bein a shared environment where others can overload, and that overload can affect your site, and your downtime could nto be compensated easily by anything.

But at the same time, they might find a dedicated server for a few sites that they have to be quite expensive, and that they might not need so much of resources. What do they do? They go to virtual servers.

You buy a server, and a Virtuozzo or a Xen license, install it on your OS, and you have your virtual serers on a dedicated server ready You can have as many virtual servers as your operating system permits. In linux, it is virtually unlimited, and you can create as many virutal enviromnets as you like, but a windows server has got its limitations. It also, does depend on your license.

You could go for openvz for linux, the open source server virtualization software, and since it doesnt come with any licnese fee, it would cost you a lot less, though that gain would vanish away when you employ specialists in that line of server administration.

You can set the Processor, Memory and hard drive resources, and unlike in a shared environment, you will have these resources always on the standby for you, and no one else would be using it, even if its being unused. So, virtually, except for its physical configurations, it is a dedicated server.

Various applications of server virtualization will follow this article soon.