Understanding VPS Hosting

Choosing the right webhost has always been tricky. With wide variety of options designed to fit our needs and mostly the cheap offers we get  + the perks on every other web hosting package its not easy to choose the right package.

Most of the time the confusion is over getting a cheap shared hosting plan over the fair priced VPS or other packages. So we start our hunt trying to finalize the decision based on reviews posted by users or affiliates ( most of them ). One fundamental thing we forget is, to understand what’s the actual difference between them.

In this post I would try to cover the most basic difference we all should know about the web hosting packages which are usually offered. Shared hosting , VPS Hosting and Dedicated Hosting.Shared hosting is usually cheap and easy to manage, as the setup is already done, but the resources are pretty limited. We do not actually have any control over the server, nor do we have a guarantee of the site to be up if we get a sudden spike in traffic. So what do we do?Well the simple answer for that would be getting a dedicated server.
Dedicated servers are powerful and highly customisable as per the website needs, there needs to be some level of technical knowledge required for managing a dedicated server. The hosting company does try to help you out, but its advisable to go for that only if you really have a high traffic website and need the complete server resources to be concentrated on your website(s).

To be honest, dedicated servers are pretty expensive and if you are a good startup you might not have that much of money to fit in a dedicated server in your budget. So the question arises, what do we do if you site is big and a shared hosting plan cannot handle the traffic?

Here comes the need of a VPS hosting.

What is VPS Hosting?
Virtual Private Server hosting is a economical hosting solution with almost all the feature a dedicated hosting package can provide,  its  perfect for a website which can’t be hosted on a shared hosting but isn’t that big enough to move to a dedicated hosting.

Shared vs  VPS
In a shared webhosting , your website  is hosted on a server on which a bunch of other sites are already hosted, all the server resources ( RAM, CPU, Disk space ) are shared by every website hosted on that server. So if you site needs any more resources which isn’t available on the server, you might face slow loading site issues or downtime depending upon the service provider.  Whereas, for VPS,  the name is self explanatory, Virtual Private Server is a flexible solution between a shared hosting and a dedicated hosting. Just like dedicated hosting, VPS has its own disk space, RAM only the CPU is being shared between a few other sites.  Unlike  shared hosting, VPS gives you complete  server side customization as per your needs, you can call it a virtual machine  on which your site is hosted.

One good feature about VPS is, despite having a shared CPU most of the web hosting companies offer you Burstable RAM. Where does this help? Well this stuff helps to handle the ‘Digg-effect’ wherein your site gets an unexpected amount of traffic and the provided amount of resources won’t help counter the traffic. So the reserved burstable memory is called upon to manage the temporary high traffic.

But let me remind you this, most web hosting companies provide all these features on a VPS. Still its better to confirm with them before signing up.

Types of VPS

Not all VPS packages are same, they are broadly sub divided as per server management. The webhosting company manages all the hardware and network of the VPS only difference  being the software and custom needs of every user.

Un-managed – The web hosting company isn’t responsible for the  softwares and performance issues on this package.

Semi-Managed - The basic software is installed by the web host. The user has to handle all the custom software which is to be installed on the VPS, the support won’t help  you much with any sort of software installation or upgradation.

Fully Managed - The web host manages everything, i.e. all the host installs all the requested/required software for the user.

So a VPS is usable only for advanced users who root access to the server which shared hosting can’t provide. If you are looking for server side software customization including PHP, MySQL , Apache and all its better to go for VPS which can provide you all the characteristics of a dedicated server but a little less expensive cost.

Who would need a VPS ?

Well its pretty impressive to have a VPS for your website, but do you really need it?
If you have a shared hosting package right now and you are using all the provided resources its better to go for a upgrade. For static websites, a shared hosting would be perfect. But if you are having a few many websites with a huge database, and large amount of data with dynamic content and the possibility that you would have spiked traffic on quite many occasions,  VPS would be perfect for you.

In, all a VPS is a good for going beyond shared hosting and requires less investment than a dedicated server.