Comparison between Hosting Options

Physical Hosting

Virtual Hosting

On-Premise Cloud Computing (Nebula)

Cloud Computing (AWS) 

Client pays for up-front hardware purchase

yes

no

no

no

Client pays month-by-month for server usage

no

yes

no

yes

Client pays for operating-system licensing for Windows or Red Hat Linux

yes

no

yes

yes

Managed services are available from ITS

yes

yes

yes

yes

Appropriate for P1-P4 data
(excluding PCI, e.g. credit cards)

yes

yes

no

see deployment guidance

Physical location of hardware

UCSC

SDSC

UCSC

SDSC

UCSC

SDSC (planned)

varies

Uses UCSC network-address space

yes

yes

yes

yes

(with CNAME)

Redundant hardware

depends

yes

no

depends