VPS Servers: Deciding When They are Necessary for Hosting
Web hosting has become a necessity for businesses. It facilitates everything from marketing to customer support. The challenge with web hosting is ensuring that it is robust enough to meet the needs of your business. Your hosting needs to be powerful enough to support serving pages to as many visitors as you have, but this added power cost money and other resources. To help you decide when you should upgrade from basic shared hosting to a more robust private server, let’s examine some of the signs that it is necessary to do so.
Problems That Occur When Your Current Hosting is Insufficient
Many companies and individuals utilize the most basic levels of shared hosting. This puts them in a situation where their websites are hosted as very thin instances on servers that can be filled to capacity with hundreds of other instances. The problem is that these servers utilize shared resources. They are partitioned as each instance needs more resources.
When other websites or even your own utilize too many resources, this can result in every website becoming unavailable. Your website may run slowly, encounter “Page not found” errors, and spontaneously break.
If your website is encountering sporadic problems or your visitors report that certain features are unavailable, then that is your first sign that an upgrade to your web hosting plan may be in the near future. The added RAM, CPU power, database space and raw storage that virtual private server (VPS) hosting can provide can solve many of these errors.
The Case of Heightened Periods of Traffic
There are cases where your website may experience bursts of traffic that you could seldom plan for. New stories, certain periods of the year, sales and even being linked to on popular websites like Reddit can bring your website to its knees. This is especially true when you use shared hosting, which occurs due to the problems listed above.
It’s important to realize that VPS hosting cannot eliminate the errors you will encounter during heightened periods of traffic, but it can make it so your website is just slow rather than being completely unavailable.
This occurs because VPS setups have hard resource allocations limits. Each instance is given, for example, 2 GB of RAM and a certain number of CPU cycles. These resource stay allocated even when they are not actively employed. When a peak period of traffic occurs, these resources are utilized in full. This allows your website to continue running with only a small amount of waste.
Fulfilling the Need for More Customization and Control
There are times when you will need certain software and libraries to be installed on your server to enable the applications you need on your website. You may also encounter situations where the ability to change configuration files can optimize your server to fit your needs.
The problem is that shared hosting does not allow you to do this. Even when it does, you will generally need to contact technical support and wait for them to perform the changes you require.
By upgrading to a virtual private server, you gain significantly more control over your server. It acts as a self-contained instance, which means that it is as close as you can get to having full control over your server.
This can allow you to install applications that use the open-source library Node.js like Ghost, which is a popular blogging platform, or developing applications similar to Netflix or Paypal. It can even allow you to develop your own libraries or versions of existing libraries that fulfill your website’s unique needs.
Keeping Your Server Secure
Another unique benefit of VPS servers is the fact that information is partitioned from other websites. There is no risk of information from one website permeating another, nor is there is a risk that one website will become infected and your data could be stolen.
There’s a few reasons this increased security exists in a VPS situation. The first and foremost reason is the fact that memory is partitioned for each website. One website will never access another website’s memory, which in turn significantly increases security.
Another benefit is that you can enable advanced security monitoring features like SSH on VPS hosting environments. This can boost the amount of security between you and your server, allow you to patch security holes in a faster manner, and allow you to control how your data is secured.
The Ability to Scale with Your Needs
Because VPS servers are designed to utilize an arbitrary amount of resources, increasing the amount of resources your VPS uses or even moving your website to a new physical server is possible.
If your business is at the stage where it expects to grow, or your website visitors are steadily climbing, then this may make VPS servers perfect for you. You can scale your server to use more resources without being forced to start from scratch each time.
Affordability and Power Without the Cost
VPS servers bring numerous benefits to established and growing websites. They offer scalability, security, more control and substantially more reliability than the traditional shared hosting environments. This increased power does not come with a significant increase to cost. Some VPS server setups can cost as much as more robust shared hosting solutions while offering the benefits that shared hosting cannot.
VPS hosting can also offer many of the features that dedicated hosting does without the substantial increase to hosting costs. While you do not have complete control over the server, you generally have enough control for all but the most advanced hosting needs.
VPS Servers: Design to Meet Your Hosting Needs
VPS server setups provide numerous advantages over shared hosting situations. They many of the features that tend to be found in dedicated hosting without the substantial increase to cost or the heightened technical knowledge they require.
This makes VPS perfect for everyone from growing businesses to websites with a substantial amount of traffic. They are designed to be modular, which in turn makes them perfect for growth and configuring to be more efficient.
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