Choosing from various web hosting plans filled with offers and confusing terminology. Many times marketers use the technical terms to oversell things. Fact of the matter is that it is seldom clear what exactly is being offered. That is why, comparing the features and facilities from various providers at a given price point and choosing the best suitable becomes more arduous task. To help navigate this jungle of terminology, today we will talk about VPS hosting in more details.
VPS stands for virtual private server. Here, a physical server is taken and virtualization software is installed on it. Virtualization software can create many virtual server environments on a given physical server. Hence the same physical server now appears to have tens of virtual servers running. The beauty of the technology such that you can assign each of these different virtual servers to different clients. And, they will have complete control over the virtual server including the kind of operating system, software etc. Unlike shared hosting, the client becomes administrator or powerful user on the virtual server.
More affordable as compared to dedicated hosting as one do not have to pay complete price of a physical server like in case of dedicated hosting.
Pros
VPS hosting is more secure as there is good isolation between virtual environments created on the physical sever.
Since you are the administrator or root user for your virtual environment, you have complete control over the virtual server space.
VPS hosting is more scalable as compared to shared hosting type.
Cons
VPS type of hosting is costlier as compared to shared hosting.
In VPS there are only few virtual environments/servers created on one physical server as compared to shared hosting. However, there are some chances that one virtual server if gets overloaded due to traffic, may affect your website performance.
There are two types of hosting offered, one managed hosting and second unmanaged hosting. Unmanaged hosting may be little cheaper than managed hosting. If you choose unmanaged VPS hosting, it may become difficult for you to configure, host and maintain your website. Because this requires some level of technical expertise.
When should you go for Virtual private server or VPS hosting
You might have started with shared hosting for your first attempt to make your business online. After hosting your website, you must have focused on different digital marketing efforts to drive the traffic to your website. Obviously, they would include social media marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, local search engine optimization etc.
All these efforts would culminate into increased traffic on your website. After a couple of months, you can switch to VPS hosting when you see increase traffic and more conversions. This would make the cost of VPS hosting affordable. VPS is recommended for fast-growing websites.
