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What is a Hybrid Server? Hybrid Dedicated Servers Explained

Throughout the past year, you may have noticed more Hybrid Server offerings being featured here on LowEndBox. While this is a relatively new offering so to speak, the LowEndBox staff are working to get in touch with more hosting providers that offer this product to encourage them to create exclusive LEB deals for our readers to enjoy. However, this still leaves the question that some of our readers may be wondering: What is a Hybrid Server? This article, contributed by the folks at RackNerd.com, explains in detail what a hybrid server is, the benefits of a hybrid server, and some example use cases that a hybrid server might be a great fit for.

Read more to continue…

A hybrid server is a relatively new type of hosting that combines the power you’d typically expect with a traditional dedicated server, along with the flexibility of cloud computing features. With hybrid servers, you still receive 100% of the allocated resources (fully dedicated resources), yet the price is lower than traditional dedicated servers, plus you take advantage of cloud virtualization features including but not limited to: instant activation, automatic OS reinstallation’s, scale up at any time, control panel with reboot, stop, boot, vnc, rescue, power off, logs and additional features.

Virtualization means separation of resources from a physical system. With a hybrid server, you receive a fraction of a physical host, and leverage the pre-existing physical components of a dedicated server. As you can already start to realize, a hybrid server is based on the concept similar to a VPS but it’s split into larger portions that deliver higher performance and more resources at a lower price (higher value).

Benefits of a Hybrid Server:

  • Better Performance, Larger Resources

As hybrid servers consist of dedicated resources, they tend to provide better performance than you’d expect from a regular VPS. Also, most hybrid servers consist of at least 4 GB of RAM and up, with generous amounts of disk storage and bandwidth similar to what you’d expect with a dedicated server. This means that if your website or application is outgrowing a VPS environment, you may want to consider upgrading to a hybrid server hosting solution.

 

  • Great Security and Redundancy

A hybrid server has less tenants on an underlying host node. Generally speaking, you will benefit from more security and accessibility than you would receive from a regular public cloud environment. With a hybrid server, you leverage the provider’s pre-existing infrastructure design as well (for example, in most cases with RAID-10, and high performing disks — whereas with a dedicated server on your own, this would only increase cost). Most hosting providers design their nodes like this naturally in order to provide an excellent service and to make it as lucrative, yet as cost-competitive as possible.

 

  • Like a Dedicated Server, Without The Cost

A hybrid server acts like a dedicated server (with its own dedicated CPU, memory, storage allocations) except at a lower cost as you are leveraging pre-existing physical components of an already-deployed host server within a datacenter. 

 

  • Scalability Features

A hybrid server provides more scalability than you would expect with a regular dedicated server. This is thanks to its virtualized nature – it allows for cloud-like features such as migrations between different physical host nodes, server resource allocation changes, and more on the fly.

 

Closing Thoughts

It’s easy to see why a hybrid server is an excellent choice for hosting websites, gameservers, CMS’s, eCommerce sites, databases, file storage, and more. It’s also useful for development use purposes, as the cloud-like (virtualization) features allow for you to re-install the server’s operating system at any time — whereas with a standard dedicated server, it would be a more manual and time-consuming task to reinstall the server by hand.

 

Looking for a Hybrid Server? Check out past offers on Low End Box that featured Hybrid Servers or RackNerd, who contributed this informative article/guide to our community provides this type of new hosting service. 

 

Have you used a hybrid server before? We’d love to know your thoughts and experiences. Please feel free to leave a comment down below!

Jon Biloh

7 Comments

  1. For a limited time, RackNerd will be offering 50% off our Hybrid Dedicated Servers on any billing cycle, use promo code: RNHYBRID

    Promotion applicable to website orders (not existing promotions) – expiry of promotion code undetermined.

    July 10, 2020 @ 5:44 pm | Reply
  2. Rev:

    Soooo, the Hybrid server is just a big VPS. Okay, good to know!

    July 11, 2020 @ 2:31 pm | Reply
  3. Tyeth Gundry:

    This article is clear as mud, what is the real difference on your infrastructure end between a VPS with 4cores and 4GB RAM compared to a hybrid VPS with the same spec, surely you’re probably running them on the same “dedicated” hardware in the same serverfarm… Please clarify for us plebs…

    July 14, 2020 @ 5:05 pm | Reply
    • Hi Tyeth, thanks for commenting!

      People who are in the market for hybrid dedicated servers are generally those who are looking for actual dedicated resources and as such it’s highly recommended for end-users to reach out to the potential provider before ordering to ensure they do not mix hybrid servers with their regular VPS nodes. For example, we deploy hybrid services based upon nodes that are set up for hybrid services only.

      Stay safe and healthy out there.

      July 14, 2020 @ 5:23 pm | Reply
      • Tyeth Gundry:

        Thanks Dustin, I guess I dangerously assumed the vcpu and IO was the only bits with contention issues as normally it’s guaranteed resources (RAM + disk at least) in normal VPS, but I know sharing a cpu or harddisk fairly is nearly impossible and very wasteful so a bit of flex is best. Love to see someone say what their different setup is compared to their non-hybrid offering and where the difference can be felt/measured.

        July 15, 2020 @ 8:26 am | Reply
  4. Francisco Reyes:

    Agree with rest of comments that the article was not clear.

    Based on the description at racknerd, and other providers with similar offerings, I believe the main difference between a regular VM and a “hybrid dedicated” is not over-committing CPU and RAM.

    Regular VPS
    Host with 16 cores and 32GB of RAM
    Could have VMs using say 20 cores with the expectation that not all VMs will be in use
    Potentially similar with RAM where sum of all VMs allocation is greater than 32

    Hybrid dedicated VPNs
    Host with 16 cores and 32GB of RAM
    The sum of the cores for all VMs doesn’t go above 16
    Sum of the memory for all VMs doesn’t go above 32GB

    Although hybrid dedicated is a step above regular VMs one can still be impacted by a noisy neighbor (search for virtual machine noisy neighbor for articles explaining the concept). For example having a machine with 4 web servers is vastly different from 4 VMs with databases. Since disks could be based on the storage of the host then VMs that are I/O heavy could potentially have an impact on performance unless the virtualization server has some quality of service parameters.

    In cases where disk is coming from a storage device accessed through the network, even if the disk subsystem could keep up, the given host could still face a bottleneck on the network card(s).

    In short I think..
    Regular VMs – if price is the overwhelming need or have light requirements
    Hrybird VMs – if want better performance, and in theory more predicable, at lesser cost than dedicated
    Dedicated – guaranteed performance at the host level since nothing else will be running

    July 23, 2020 @ 5:10 pm | Reply

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