Virtual hosting

Virtualization has drastically changed this paradigm. By allowing hardware resources to be pooled and allocated logically to multiple guest systems, a single pool of hardware resources could contain all of the disparate operating systems, applications, database types, and other application necessities on a homogenous pool of servers, which provided centralized management and dynamically allocated interfaces and devices to multiple organizations in a prioritized manner.  Web applications, in particular, benefited from this, as the flexibility of virtualization has offered a means to create parallel application environments, clones of databases, and so on, for the purposes of testing, quality assurance, and the creation of surge capacity. Because system administrators could now manage multiple workloads on the same pool of resources, hardware and support costs (for example power, floor space, installation and provisioning) could also be reduced, assuming the licensing costs don't neutralize the inherent efficiencies. Many applications still run in virtual on-premise environments.