IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. It means instead of buying servers, racking them in a data center, setting up networking, hiring ops staff, and dealing with hardware failures yourself, you pay a monthly fee and someone else provides all of that. VPS hosting is one of the most common forms of IaaS.
What’s included in IaaS
When you use an IaaS provider like us, you get:
- Physical servers in professionally managed data centers with redundant power and cooling
- Network connectivity with multiple carriers and DDoS protection
- Hypervisor infrastructure that creates and manages your virtual servers
- SSD storage (in our case, Ceph-backed for redundancy)
- Operating system installation (automated templates for Linux and Windows)
- A control panel to deploy, manage, and monitor your servers
- Support staff who can help with hardware issues, network problems, and infrastructure questions
You don’t have to think about spare parts, data center leases, BGP routing, or 3 AM hardware failures. We handle the infrastructure; you focus on your application.
IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS
IaaS gives you the most control. You get a full server with root access, and you install and manage your own software. That’s what you get with our VPS hosting and dedicated server plans.
PaaS (Platform as a Service) adds a layer on top: you deploy code and the platform handles the server, runtime, and scaling. Heroku and AWS Elastic Beanstalk are examples. You give up control of the server in exchange for convenience.
SaaS (Software as a Service) is the fully managed end: you use an application someone else runs. Gmail, Slack, and Shopify are SaaS. You don’t manage any infrastructure.
For developers and businesses that want control over their server environment, security configuration, and software stack, IaaS (specifically VPS hosting) is usually the right level.
VPS hosting as IaaS
Our VPS hosting platform is IaaS. You deploy a Linux VPS or Windows VPS, get root access, and install whatever you need. We handle the data center, hardware, network, and storage layer. You handle the OS configuration, application deployment, and security hardening.
For larger workloads, our bare metal dedicated servers are also IaaS: you get a full physical server managed in our data center with our network, and you have complete control over what runs on it.
We operate six data centers (Las Vegas, Dallas, Ashburn, Santa Clara, Amsterdam, Singapore) so you can deploy close to your users. Sign up for VPS hosting or contact us for custom infrastructure needs.