VPS (Virtual Private Server) is one of four server types, and each has its own advantages over the others depending on your intended usage.
Essentially, VPS hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting and cloud servers are different ways of storing information. If you have very high traffic then a dedicated web server might be preferable, which specifically allows you a set size of resources. You and you alone have access to a remote server, with no other accounts present. The opposite is a shared server, where a number of different users will share the same resources – memory, processing power, and CPU time, for example. This might not seem preferable at first glance, but shared hosting is a far cheaper option than taking on your own, single server.
VPS is nestled between the two options. While your files, website, data, applications and any other information that you might want hosted are still sharing some resources of a server with other clients such as CPU time and memory, a specific portion of those resources is still specifically dedicated to individual clients/accounts. You are still responsible for maintenance of your specific portion of the server.
VPS sites have a number of advantages that you might consider, particularly when comparing them to shared hosting. They give you more flexibility over your files, with more space to utilise them. Typically, a VPS might offer anywhere up to 16GB of RAM a month with several hundred GB of disk space – more than enough for most businesses. That space is enough for complex web applications, multiple websites with considerable traffic, some of which might feature forums or web shops.
A second advantage is scalability, and the ability to be able to move our business up to the next level. Let’s say we’ve established an SME with website pages handled on a shared server. Traffic has been booming and you’d like to reflect that, by moving to a server package that reflects this. The ability to swap to a certain amount of resource (or container) without having to ‘turn off’ the site for any decent period of time, is one that could be beneficial. Of course, you could have started on a VPS in the first place, which would have eliminated the need for a transition – only an extension to a more appropriate pricing and data plan. There’s also the privacy aspect, if you set it up properly you can make use of a VPN australia or any other proxy service, point is, get savy about privacy.
Having that ‘partition’ – your own personal space within a server without sharing with someone else – is also somewhat of a protective measure that does not exist with a shared server. Imagine if another user of that server somehow corrupted or overloaded it – you would also suffer. That trauma would be passed on to your customers, who might look elsewhere. Even an hour could be devastating for a small retailer at pivotal times of the year, such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Remember though: as you are still sharing a processor with other users on a VPS, problems can still occur with performance.
While a dedicated server may give you a truly customised experience it comes at a price. Unless your website is a truly huge one catering for a large-sized business, you probably won’t need the added expense. An individual dedicated server, taking up its own source of electricity and the resources needed to physically build it in the first place, is less ecologically friendly than any shared or VPS servers.
A final solution is the cloud server; multiple servers working together in a cluster, of potentially unlimited storage and no tie to a designated piece of hardware. There are many pros with such systems, and few disadvantages other than the far higher costs involved, as some experts have detailed. Indeed, many companies now offer cloud VPS systems – an amalgamation of the two server types. Find out more about VPS servers here before making your final choice. There’s perhaps no ‘one size fits all answer – but VPS is probably the closest you’re going to get.