Did you know that without virtual hosting, a physical server is used approximately 15% of the time that it is powered on? Surely that can’t be good for the environment…

The answer is obvious. Any electrical device or piece of machinery that is left on and not used to its full capacity can be considered a detrimental waste of energy. But there’s nothing we can do to change this when it comes to servers. In order to run a business of any kind, it is crucial to have a working IT network. Servers are essential. But this is where virtual hosting comes in.

Virtual hosting can make a huge difference to the environment by tackling the age-long issue of underutilisation. The average physical server will be used between 5%-15% of the time that it is up and running – but we can’t turn them off. A typical office will probably have two or three servers responsible for the IT communications, so that could be a problem tripled in just one business location. What about all the other offices? What about our homes? Virtual hosting, otherwise known as “cloud computing” can remove the need for physical servers altogether and more and more organisations are moving over to this new technological trend.

Under Utilisation and Energy Consumption

Not only does it cost the earth in endless resources just to build and maintain our desktop computers and other hardware, but our usage adds to the problem – daily. Virtual hosting will soon become an essential part of our world, as today, companies are ineffective without the facility of modern IT. A retail company can not process orders without it, a telemarketing agency can not make/log calls without it, and businesses in all sectors will find that they are unable to carry off processes and procedures without it.

Virtual hosting can increase utilisation by anything up to 95%. This is such a phenomenal difference, and anyone who uses this service will see a calculable improvement in company expenditure.

Better Utilisation and Better Service Levels

Maximised usage, minimised consumption and cheaper bills? There has to be a compromise somewhere. As far as we can humanly detect, no! In fact, with virtual hosting, you will also be promised improved service levels. Virtualisation is the sharing and pooling of servers, so you can have 99.9% of guaranteed uptime. What does this mean for the IT technician that comes in once a month? It means you will see him/her a lot less. Virtual hosting services provide managed servers so you don’t have to worry about planned downtime, maintenance costs, or the hassle of software updates.

The New Way to Compute

Virtual hosting is the new way to deliver a resilient IT infrastructure in your company. If you are interested in virtual private servers with Linux or Windows, visit the SwitchLink website for more. Packages start at just £5.99.