Credit unions are hosting their websites on Virtual Private Servers. Does your credit union know the benefits of a managed hosting environment?

How is your credit union hosting its website – shared, collocated, or dedicated? What if you can get a well-managed hosting solution that has the benefits of all three – the cost effectiveness of a shared solution, the exact configuration of your collocated server, and the security and control of a dedicated solution? The answer is a managed Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosted solution.

VPS is a virtual server located on a host server, which allows your credit union to easily set up its website and any associated custom applications in a well-controlled environment, while running the exact operating system and applications that your website requires. With a VPS hosted solution, there is no need to comply with the stringent requirements of a shared solution, no need to worry if your collocated server’s hardware fails, and no need to be concerned about how to migrate your website and applications to a new server when you need to upgrade your dedicated server.

A VPS solution, in a managed hosting environment, provides your credit union with the usual benefits of managed hosting services, like redundancy, increased security, reliability, and monitoring services. This results in helping to prevent a host of issues from failed backups to unwanted access. It also enables you to easily add resources (e.g., memory and hard disk space), while providing high availability to keep your website and online banking services accessible to your members even with a hardware failure on the host server.

A summary of the VPS benefits that allow your credit union’s website to have minimal downtime include:

1. High availability in the primary datacenter – virtual servers are automatically moved to redundant hardware after a failure is detected;
2. A full VPS backup can easily be deployed to an alternate hosting location;
3. Virtual technology facilitates replication of data stores to a disaster recovery site; and
4. A VPS combined with DNS failover allows an automatic switchover to a standby VPS at an alternate datacenter (less than 5 minutes of downtime.