When you are using shared hosting for your website and you observe that the server and resources that are being offered to you are unable to cope with your site’s requirements (usually disk space and monthly bandwidth), you will start thinking about availing a dedicated server for your site. However, due to the high costs involved in getting your own server, you may not be able to afford a dedicated server. This is where VPS or Virtual Private Server comes in.
What is VPS hosting?
In VPS web hosting, the hosting company creates multiple partitions or virtual servers on a real server. Like in shared hosting, clients share the resources on a single server. However, the hosting company will give you the power to decide on its server components. For instance, if the server is running on 4GHZ CPU and 8GB RAM, you may be allotted 1GHz CPU and 2GB RAM.
What are its benefits?
Apart from this, VPS users will be able to use lots of other exclusive services like choosing the operating system, hosting multiple websites, etc. Also, you will be able choose from several hosting plans and if you go for a higher plan, you will be able to upgrade your server configurations as well.
There are many reasons to go for VPS:
- You get the flexibility of dedicated hosting at a lesser price.
- It lets you decide on server configurations and other resources.
- Your sites that are hosted on a virtual private server are virtually separate from other users. Hence, there is no risk of virus infection or security attack due to other sites.
- The traffic load of other websites hosted on the same server will not affect your site’s performance.
- You can upgrade or downgrade without encountering downtime.
- Your site visitors will enjoy faster loading times.
Who should go for it?
It is a very viable solution for medium and large businesses. Small business owners that are currently using limited resources offered by shared hosting may want to switch to VPS when they observe that shared hosting is not able to handle the site traffic. When dedicated hosting still seems to be an expensive deal, VPS hosting will be the only suitable option for small businesses in many such cases.
What to look for?
First off, you need to decide whether you’d like to use unmanaged, semi-managed or fully managed servers. In unmanaged servers, you take the full charge of the hardware, software and connection issues. In case of semi-managed servers, you’ll be able to personalize some of the software and applications. And in fully managed servers, you don’t have to bother about any of the issues – everything is managed for you by the web hosting company.
Then you need to decide about the server configuration. You need to be sure about what capacity RAM, CPU, and bandwidth you want to have. An easy-to-use control panel would be a great help, especially if you are the non-geeky type. Apart from this, don’t forget about the server uptime and technical support.
