When choosing where to live, you generally have two options: either you can buy or rent a standalone house, or you can live in an apartment in a shared block. With the former your neighbors are much less likely to be an issue, with the later you tend to have a lot more regular contact with them in an apartment in a shared building. But the price you pay for the added privacy of a house is usually higher, with additional administrative costs included – both of which are typically lower in an apartment block.
Searching for a suitable home for your web project or company IT infrastructure is similar in several aspects: running your own physical server (either on your own or hosted by a provider), including all the necessary software and hardware, is an expensive solution and requires greater effort, but it does mean you remain 100% in control of the resources and management of your server. If you turn to virtualized resources to save costs, you share the base of your project with others – which can lead to occasional fluctuation in performance.
The cause for this is usually too much strain being placed on resources by a co-tenant, which has led to the use of the term ‘the ‘noisy neighbor’ effect’. Today, you can witness the phenomenon of a performance-impairing ‘neighbor’ instantly, particularly in flexible cloud computing, which is built on the presence of a multi-tenancy, or multi-instance architecture (particularly the public clouds).