Guide: Hosting Options
This guide describes the virtual and physical hosting options available at UC Santa Cruz to support your compute and storage needs.
In this guide
Not sure which option is best?
Request an informal conversation with technology experts via the Architectural Review Board (ARB) to explore which hosting options best meet your needs.
Virtual hosting
A cost-effective shared hosting platform in the ITS Data Center or AWS for virtual machines. More efficient in server capacity, hardware, and energy usage than purchasing separate hardware.
Why choose virtual hosting?
- Easier and faster to implement with no lead team for hardware ordering and installation
- Flexibility to scale up or down as needed
- No hardware or maintenance to worry about since ITS takes care of this for you
- Virtualization enables maximum equipment resource usage and efficiency
- Highly redundant and secure to minimize the risk of downtime
Two offerings are available from ITS:
- Enterprise: Virtual hosting for campus, with a server size limit of 8 vCPU max.
- Academic: Virtual hosting for graduate students and faculty with research, teaching, and learning needs, with a server size limit of 4 vCPU max.
Physical hosting
Physical Hosting of computer and storage equipment is best for those that require their own hardware to run workload and/or store data. The primary ITS data center is a contracted remote colocation facility.
This professionally run, purpose-built facility is designed to provide a controlled environment with power, cooling, security, connectivity and technical services to store and operate servers, storage devices, network equipment, and other hardware.
Why choose physical hosting?
- You need to manage 100% of the hardware
- You require 100% dedicated resources 100% of the time
- You have special hardware requirements (graphics processors, HPC, etc.)
- Specific 3rd-party application license restrictions
Cloud hosting
UCSC has a university-wide agreement for public Cloud Hosting (Amazon Web Services). This agreement provides the UCSC community with discounted rates for all faculty, staff, and departmental use.
Cloud hosting through AWS offers low up-front costs, high flexibility to change, reduced maintenance, and on-demand scalability.
Why choose a virtual server?
- Your workload needs 99.9% uptime
- You need the flexibility of cloud services
- You want a dynamic solution for increased demand when needed
- You need a scalable solution where you only pay for what you use