For all the hype, over the last few years an increasing number of businesses have started moving not just distribution but more important business processes online in earnest. The main reason this much anticipated migration has dragged its heels is that change takes time, and businesses going online are faced with hurdles of cost, complexity, resourcing, and marketing at every step of the process.

The workhorse in terms of infrastructure of this fundamental change is hosting.

As many businesses now know, hosting has a wide range of options in terms of cost and function, but it's the growth of Dedicated Hosting that has continued to gather momentum over recent years. The most interesting aspect of this growth is that indicators show that most businesses are at the bottom of the adoption curve and that the most aggressive growth is yet to come.

What customers want

What customers have wanted, but more importantly needed, over the past years has changed considerably. As businesses become leaner and headcounts shrink, so priorities and their drivers have changed. So-called "Have-to-haves" or essential requirements are the issues ones getting any traction, relegating "Nice-to-haves" to the back-burner until they either become irrelevant or are escalated for other reasons.

This phenomenon has seen companies spend less time, resources and money on their online presence than they might have.

Priorities have changed.

Issues that have re-prioritised the importance and investment in online presence and tools now include better brand awareness through greater exposure, increased distribution driving higher sales and new markets, and better processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

As customers realise that their commitment to their online tools needs to increase, so too does their requirement for effective development.

Once the development has been defined and is nearing completion, the tool requires a means of delivery, being effective hosting.

Hosting is then divided into two categories: Shared hosting (otherwise known as virtual hosting, as opposed to virtualised hosting) and dedicated hosting.

Dedicated hosting is a requirement once the environment that the developer requires becomes either more complex. or more customised than a vanilla shared hosting environment.

In short, custom development requires the freedom that only a dedicated hosting environment can deliver.

How service providers are meeting customers’ needs

Dedicated hosting has traditionally been delivered by Carriers, Internet Service Providers or Hosting Providers. Of these, it has quickly become apparent that hosting, particularly dedicated hosting, is a specialisation requiring specific skills to deliver the required product offerings.

As dedicated hosting growth gathers momentum, so too does the need for fast, cost effective delivery. Until recently, delivering dedicated hosting has meant a long-winded and complex process for both service provider and customer alike, involving specifying and sourcing the right hardware, burn testing, server OS configuration, application configuration, IDC installation and connectivity configuration and finally a handover to the customer to, only then, start the process of final configuration for production rollout.

The process is long-winded, expensive and complex for all parties concerned.

Issues continue for dedicated hosting servers set up this way as, when the times to upgrade disk, RAM or even the whole server, the process begins again from the start.

Virtualisation: Not as good as, better

New virtualization technology is now set to deliver dedicated hosting in a way that not only eliminates most of the complexity for both service provider and customer alike, but introduces many additional virtualised hosting benefits that have not previously existed.

For service providers, it allows scalable, profitable and fast delivery of premium dedicated hosting.

For customers, it eliminates hardware, hardware drivers and hardware upgrades. In addition, due to the features included in some Server virtualisation technology, it delivers far higher levels of availability and allows clones of production environments to be created for seamless development and rollout.

Virtualisation and virtualisation

As either a service provider or a customer, it’s important to understand that many different flavours of server virtualisation exist, bringing different price points, levels of resource control and base-OS independence.

Apart from resource control and allocation, stability of, and independence from, the underlying OS is essential to realising all the available benefits of server virtualisation technology and quality Virtualised Hosting.

Of all the current crop of server virtualisation technology, VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 seems to lead the market against all of the above criteria, combining the highest available resource control with elimination of hardware drivers. Infrastructure 3 also allows intelligent high-availability redistribution of VMs from failed physical servers to the remaining healthy servers in the farm.

Server virtualisation technology is set to expand its market share as it has in the wider server market – it just depends on whether virtualised hosting service providers and customers alike realise the possibilities available for premium virtualised hosting.