Virtual Servers

Virtual servers have become the standard of web hosting, with many providers making the decision to only offer virtual environments. People often want to know “Which cloud provider is best?”. The fact of the matter is, Softlayer (or AWS, Azure etc.)  aren’t always going to be the best, depending on your requirements another provider may excel in that specific area.

So with your requirements in mind. Here is what softlayer brings to the table.

  • Guaranteed 2.0GHz (or faster) cores: When a virtual server is deployed on the SoftLayer platform, it may be located in a shared environment, but it never exists in an over-subscribed environment. Virtual servers are placed on machines that have applicable space and performance, so customers are guaranteed core speeds of at least 2.0GHz.
  • Rapid Deployment: Because SoftLayer’s data centers run primarily on automation, virtual servers are generally spun up in a matter of minutes, as opposed to hours or days. In the event that there isn’t available space on an existing machine within one of our data centers, a new physical device will be deployed and the virtual server will be available in no more than four hours.
  • Hourly or Monthly Pricing. When ordering a virtual server, either an hourly or monthly billing model may be selected. The fees will still be invoiced once a month, but the added flexibility of spinning up an hourly virtual server ensures that the you won’t have to waste your financial resources when you don’t need a virtual server for a full month.
  • 250 Gb Outbound Bandwidth Included: you get 250 Gigabytes of outbound bandwidth included with every monthly virtual server, plus unlimited private network bandwidth. This means that it is highly unlikely you will pay ANY network charges.
  • Seamless Integration with Bare Metal: It’s no secret that Softlayer hang their hats on an incredible Bare Metal Offering (4 Hours… Seriously!). But when using a combination of Virtual and Bare metal, there is no integration required. Bare Metal and Virtual servers can be provisioned into the same vLANs and subnets as well as managed through exactly the same customer portal.
  • Infrastructure and Citrix Xen Managed by SoftLayer

Softlayer really target high performance with their virtual platform. Sometimes this does mean that a tiny AWS instance will be cheaper. But I would highly seeing the performance differences yourself. You can actually get a free VM for a month http://www.softlayer.com/info/free-cloud

The Virtualization Guy has a good write up that compares AWS to Softlayer.

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