A growing number of companies offer virtual private server hosting, or virtual dedicated server hosting as an extension for web hosting services. There are several challenges to consider when licensing proprietary software in multi-tenant virtual environments.
Unmanaged hosting
The customer is left to monitor and administer their own server.
Unmetered hosting
This type of service is generally offered with no limit on the amount of data-transferred on a fixed bandwidth line. Usually, unmetered hosting is offered with 10 Mbit/s, 100 Mbit/s or 1000 Mbit/s (with some as high as 10Gbit/s). This means that the customer is theoretically able to use 3.33~ TB on 10 Mbit/s, 33~ TB on 100 Mbit/s and 333~ TB on a 1000 Mbit/s line per month (although in practice the values will be significantly less).
Virtualization software
For some of the software packages commonly used to provide platform virtualization, see comparison of platform virtual machines.
Cloud server
A VPS which is dynamic (that is, it can be changed at runtime) is often referred to as a cloud server. Key attributes for this are:
- Additional hardware resources can be added at runtime (CPU, RAM)
- Server can be moved to other hardware while the server is running (automatically according to load in some cases)
