In this article, we will explore the beginnings, features, and benefits of virtual private cloud hosting, providing an overview of this relatively new cloud technology that is gaining more prominence within the industry with the aim of answering the question; what is virtual private cloud hosting?

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a private network within public cloud infrastructure, combining the benefits of both private and public cloud environments.

The public cloud features allow resources and space to be shared in a multi-tenant infrastructure while using technology such as VLAN to create complete isolation of resources from discrete customer platforms and data.

This ensures a secure method of remotely accessing cloud resources, guaranteeing performance levels and isolation for every customer environment.

It is the multi-tenant, public cloud features of resource pooling that make virtual private cloud platforms highly scalable, with the advances in virtualisation networking technology that allows for the complete separation of solutions within the platform to ensure that each users’ data is totally isolated.

Before the creation of virtual private cloud technology, choosing a hosting option often involved trade-offs; the private cloud had benefits that the public cloud did not and vice-versa.

Private cloud infrastructure had better security and performance, but it was not as easy (or cheap) to scale with demand for more resource, while the public cloud was less expensive and more scalable, but didn’t have the reliable performance or isolated security of a private cloud.

Some of the earliest recorded examples of virtual private cloud services include the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, launched by Amazon Web Services on 26th August 2009, and the Google App Engine, in which the VPC is supported through the secure data connector product, launched in April 2009.

Today, statistics show the global virtual private cloud market is growing rapidly, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.35% during the period 2016-2022, resulting in an estimated market worth of $50 billion by 2023.

The majority of growth has been within the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, but is also seen across other parts of the world.

Adoption is expected to be fastest in the ‘Asia Pacific’ market segment, leading to high CAGR growth during this period.


Europe, the UK, France, and Germany are expected to be the driving forces of growth, thanks to the increasing adoption of cloud computing and technological advancements in these countries.

In the Americas, reports indicate growth will be driven predominantly by the U.S. and Canada. This growth is due to a large number of technological advances and well-established infrastructure in those regions as well as the general rising demand for low-cost disaster recovery through cloud-based solutions such as vCloud Air Disaster Recovery which uses a specifically designated virtual private cloud for hosting warm standby capacity.

**Scalability**

Virtual private cloud resources can be rapidly scaled up and down at any time by adding or removing storage capacity from the shared resource pool to respond to a business’ changing requirements.

In addition, this ease of scalability lends itself well to flexible cost-management structures such as pay-as-you-go and resource-based pricing models.

**LIVE EXAMPLE**

Scalability in the Secura Virtual Private Cloud platform, for example, is managed through VMware vCloud Director, an automation and orchestration layer, which allows us to abstract virtual resources and allocate them to customers within minutes.

**Security**

Each solution on a virtual private cloud hosting platform lives on separate Virtual Machines (VM), ensuring that customer data is isolated.

Furthermore, infrastructure can be designed and implemented in-line with current industry security best practice reference architecture and data privacy guidance.

Users can control where data is located in-line with security and compliance regulations.

**Performance**

On a virtual private cloud platform, performance levels are not confined to finite resources as with self-contained, private solutions or old style multi-tenant.

This means that there is no resource contention at times of peak traffic, allowing your application or website to run at optimum performance with the levels of RAM, CPU and storage I/O it needs.

**LIVE EXAMPLE**

On the Secura VPC, this process is managed by VMware vSphere DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), which monitors our hypervisor clusters and balances the workloads to ensure that individual hypervisors aren’t over utilising RAM or CPU.

It is important to remember that whilst the foundation and basic infrastructure model of virtual private cloud is defined, no two virtual privateare exactly the same, so researching each provider’s offering is vital to make sure it meets your requirements.


For instance, to create separation of customer platforms, the AWS Virtual Private Cloud allocates a private network to customer AWS instances, segregating them from other customers.

Other providers, like Secura, use VMware technologies to create segregation, using VMware NSX, a Network Virtualisation platform that allows us to securely segregate customer network traffic using VXLAN virtual networks.

Here, the principle and aim is the same, but how this segregation is created differs, with distinct features.

Using VMware technologies across our Virtual Private Cloud infrastructure enables us to provide High Availability as standard across the platform and network, using VMware vSphere High Availability (HA).

This technology monitors all hypervisor hosts so that if a host fails in the event of an issue, vSphere HA automatically restarts Virtual Machines (VMs) on a different host ensuring that customers are always online; another distinct advantage made possible by the ‘shared’ infrastructure and resource model that this cloud tech brings.

These differences continue across the various VPC offerings so it is important to do your research from provider to provider, to ensure that their VPC platform is the right fit for your business.

In this article we have discussed answers to the question, what is virtual private cloud hosting, however, it is important to consider whether a VPC solution would be right for your business.

With many variations of cloud technology offering all kinds of different options, it can be difficult to know which is the most suitable for your business.

When considering which cloud solution would be the right fit, it’s important for companies to consider factors such as the security regulations they need to comply with, company size and type of business to narrow down the options and find out which cloud technology, platform, and provider will best meet their needs.

For some organisations, there will be a clear choice; often businesses will be comfortable in a shared public cloud environment which offers scalability and flexibility, whilst others require the more guaranteed security of a private cloud.

The virtual private cloud offers a best of both worlds solution to those businesses who require both the scalability and flexibility of a public cloud, as well as some of the enhanced security features of private.

If you still have questions around what is Virtual Private Cloud hosting or if you’d like to trial the platform against your requirements, get in touch and one of the team will be happy to help.


Helen is the SEO Executive at Secura and keeps our website and all things digital in check.

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