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Virtualization technology has increased its popularity during past couple of years and now they are even used in staging environment as opposed to their original use; test environments. For last couple of years, we’ve seen some competition in virtualization market and some superior technology as result. Virtualization is now used by companies in every scale for various business purposes.

The latest addition to both virtualization and webhosting is web hosting on virtual machines. This is different from virtual servers in technology. In a environment where web hosting is provided on a virtual environment, there are so many “virtual” servers running on the same hardware. The web hosting company can install a number of virtual machines on top of a powerful server and provide hosting facility for each. If they wish, they can assign each virtual machine for clients as dedicated servers or they can choose to server multiple clients using the same virtual machine.

With the addition of virtual machines, web hosting companies can afford a large number of installations using the same hardware; maximizing the profits. At the same time, clients would receive web space for cheaper prices due to the less maintenance cost.

In terms of technology, there are many wonderful advantages. If a reinstallation of the operating environment is needed for some reason, this can be done within few minutes of time. Most of the cases, operating system images can be stored with the required software (such as web server, database management system etc.) so the server can be up and running with a short period of time. Rebooting the system is also quite fast as the operating system runs on a hardware emulator.

Among the virtualization software for web hosting environments, VMWare and Xen take the market lead. Among many web hosting services that run servers on virtual machines, Slicehost has a good reputation.