Make Your Choice Between Xen and OpenVZ Platform
Web hosting services are type of online services that allow companies and private customers to make their sites accesible to other Intenet users. A web hosting company offers space on a server that users can pay to rent for a monthly fee. As you probably guess, any company that wants to be present on-line simply must use this service.
Still, different hosting plans suit different applications. For example, a single page hosting service is often enough for a personal web site or blog. A large company website with many pages and visitors will nevertheless need a more advanced solution.
Personal web hosting services can often be acquired for free or for a nominal fee, while more complex and involved business websites are charged a monthly fee. Why is this? Well, the more complex sites often require database support as well as application platforms. These services provide clients with the ability to write and install popular and important applications like website forums.
In this article we are going to discuss two of the most popular web hosting platforms, Xen and OpenVZ.
Which to choose?
Answering that will require some dwelling on the theme. Both platforms have forever changed the hosting industry offering a viable alternative to dedicated servers. They have created systems where a single server may act as several servers, and offer cheap hosting with full root access, choice of multiple operating systems, and full file compartmentalization for private servers.
Xen
Xen is a popular paravirtualization platform that has familiar hardware emulation. Paravirtualization operates by establishing an interface between the operating system and the system’s hardware, which then responds to requests from other operating systems that have access and can interact with a paravirtualization interface.
One of Xen’s main advantages is that systems administrators are allowed to modify kernel modules and take advantage of unused swap space for more memory.
Open VZ
OpenVz is a platform built on a Linux kernel, which has been altered to allow the operating system virtualization platform to support several Linux vps. The platform provides administrators with full root access and gives them the ability to execute all of the commands ordinarily found on a dedicated server.
Which to choose?
As you might expect, each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. People whose websites require more memory usually opt for Xen. Additional memory is especially important for those who plan to do a lot of one-off tasks like encoding video, compiling applications or Java development. But those who would prefer to constantly use swap space instead of installing the appropriate amount of RAM, shouldn’t go for Xen. That is because there are performance penalties when users constantly swap space. Actually, Xen quite often overloads when swap space is used too often, which makes it useless.
Therefore, the majority of users prefer OpenVZ. It deals faster with average operations and additionally rarely overloads, which proves higher reliability. The platform is especially effective for private users who need consistent service and require more memory overhead.