Notes from the field: Hyper-V @ Hosting company Hostbasket
I found this onto the Virtualization team blog and thought let’s share this because it’s a Belgian Customer
Hi, my name is Bert Van Pottelberghe, business unit manager at Hostbasket, which is the leading hosting company and SaaS-provider in Belgium with over 30,000 SMB customers.
In a recent survey of our datacenter with over 1,000 servers, we saw that the average CPU-usage was only 12%. On the other hand, investments in new server hardware, datacenter space and the cost of power and cooling – now at an all time high - keep prices for dedicated servers high. The hosting industry is a very competitive industry, so we needed to come up with an answer.
We have been investigating virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMWare and Virtuozzo, but always found problems (such as security-issues, complex and expensive licensing, stability or scalability) that kept us from creating a virtual machine-offer.
Our Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V offering has two components:
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- Flex Servers: Virtual servers on shared hardware platform. More info here.
- Hyper-V servers: dedicated hardware server with 2 virtual machines (application server and database server for example).
Both are positioned as dedicated servers, not as virtual servers. With these two offers we address the needs of 2 customer groups: The Flex servers are for websites and applications that have outgrown shared hosting, while the Hyper-V servers are for larger applications that used to be deployed on two (or more) separate physical servers.
We opted not to use the term “Virtual servers” for our offer, because a “virtual server” implies less value for money than a dedicated server. Also, “Virtual servers” are often associated with cheap solutions based on Parallels Virtuozzo.
Our solutions based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V provide more functionality (like snapshotting, easy installation, flexible upgrading), are more secure and stable and have a features that guarantee a higher uptime than dedicated servers.
All customers involved during the beta-stage decided to renew their subscription and gave positive comments on the stability and performance.
Bert Van Pottelberghe
Business Unit Manager
HostBasket
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