You don’t want to maintain huge servers that are running fans to keep themselves cool and do nothing but grow old gracelessly. Once they are obsolete, they have to be replaced. They break down, and last night’s backups have to be brought back up, resulting in a loss of data that can be costly. When it comes to site hosting, there are other issues with which to contend. Web traffic to your site cannot be predicted with any degree of accuracy. If you’re offering a service that suddenly takes off or captures the zeitgeist, one tweet from a well meaning customer with a lot of followers linking to your site and saying how great your service is could result in a site crash. That means a loss of business.

A slow running site due to the number of hits it receives is not an attractive one for any user. They are likely to lose patience and abandon the site altogether, regarding it as buggy, and telling their friends to avoid it too. Yet you don’t know how much capacity you may require on any given day. Under-predict the amount of traffic you’ll get and the server will crash as resources haven’t been devoted to it. Over-predict and the ten servers you’ve invested in lie pretty much idle for the best part of a decade before being replaced.

Virtualization hosting can mean the outsourcing of hosting for your site or other (practically any) computer related services. Hosting of intranets and databases are also to be found, and these are services offered by people who know what they’re doing. If your data is maintained remotely by a managed hosting service with all the resources required to do the job, with a better degree of expertise than you can, why not try it?