I understand the basic premise of web servers, but have never quite wrapped my head around what the hell a virtual host is or means, please ELI5!
In: 2
OK, let’s say you have a physical computer sitting in your office that’s your company’s web server. It’s connected to the Internet and anytime someone visits your website, that computer is powering it. That’s not ideal because if your office building loses power or loses Internet, your site goes down.
A better solution is to have someone else host it for you. You can rent a real physical computer in someone else’s data center. You install your own software on it, and they take care of ensuring it has continuous power, and multiple redundant connections to the Internet.
But, physical computers don’t last forever. The hard drive eventually dies, the fan wears out, etc. – which means your site would go down until you get a replacement.
So the solution to that is a virtual server. Basically you provide a virtual machine image, and the data center runs your virtual machine using software like VMWare. What’s great about that is that now you don’t know or care what physical machine it’s running on! If that computer dies, they can just start up your virtual machine on some other computer and you’re back up and running within minutes.
It also means upgrades are trivial! Do you need more RAM? They can just stop your virtual machine on one computer and start it on another machine with twice as much RAM. Instead of 30 minutes of downtime, you’re back up and running with twice the RAM in literally seconds.
So that’s it. It’s just a virtual machine with your own server software running on it, in some other data center.
Latest Answers