Virtual Private Servers Vps – A Guide
Web Hosting if tarred with as broad a brush as possible is split into Shared and Dedicated Hosting. There are those who purchase a space on a server for their own use and then there are those who just buy the server. A bit like buying a plane ticket or buying a plane except the difference between a return to Oslo and a Cessna are a bit more pronounced.
There is a bridge over these troubled waters however. Its known as VPS Virtual Private Server its also known as VDS Virtual Dedicated Server but thats not as common presumably because it leads to confusion with old fashioned displays and sounds like something unsavoury you might catch on a night out in Calcutta. VPS allows freedom from the constraints of Shared Hosting without the expense or expertise of a Dedicated server.
A Shared Hosting server typically has an operating system installed on it and the host then installs the software they want they set the server exactly as they like it and then customers pay them certain amounts of money to purchase a little space on the server. The customer has as much control over that space as the host will let them and their performance will be based on however many customers are Sharing the server hundreds perhaps. Remember that a server is just like your computer at home or at work and just like your computer it has a certain amount of memory and a certain speed of processor and it can only do so many things at once before it has to start putting people in a queue this is the point where your site may seem slower than usual.
A Dedicated server works the same as a Shared server except the owner of the server has far more control over what is on their server. Like the hosting company with the Shared server the owner of the Dedicated can pick the operating system what software is installed and how many sites run on the server. If a Dedicated server is set up specifically for one site and is configured for that site alone that site will run considerably faster than a site on a Shared server. It doesnt have to share resources and it can be built purely for the purposes of running that site.
VPS sits between these two types of hosting. There are several kinds of VPS but we will focus on software VPS. In this instance the host will buy the server and install an Operating System OS on it. They then use another program i.e. Virtuozzo to create several isolated Virtual Servers sometimes known as Containers on the server. Each of these Containers is a Virtual Server they function as if they were standalone Dedicated Servers when in actual fact they are a more advanced form of Shared hosting!
Compared to Shared hosting VPS has many benefits. To begin with Shared hosting comes with no performance guarantees. Thats not to say that Shared hosting is slow its just that some sites require a lot more resources than others and a few busy or intensive sites on a full Shared server could well impact the performance of everyone else try opening a few basic programs on your computer at once keep them open and then see how well your computer runs when you start a virus scan those basic programs arent so responsive now are they?.
With a VPS your Container will come with a guaranteed proportion of the servers resources. This usually comes in the form of RAM Memory available for instance your VPS might come with a guaranteed 256 or 512 MB of RAM. This means that regardless of how many people there are on the server regardless of how busy their sites are you always always have that much memory available for you to use. Some companies also advertise the burst memory available to you as well. This is essentially the memory that you could conceivably use assuming that everyone else isnt using their quota. However burst memory is a subjective term as there are no guarantees on how often this memory will be available to you beyond the length of a piece of string its more a fancy figure to impress potential customers with.
As a Container is purchased with a guaranteed RAM quota there will be far fewer customers sharing a VPS server than there would be sharing a er Shared server. So the CPU wont be divided between as many clients and their respective demands on it so speeds will improve and the load on the CPU will decrease. All in all your hosting will be noticeably faster. Again some hosts will advertise CPU preferences server contention rates etc. to demonstrate how the more expensive VPS packages will take preference to some degree over the cheaper packages when requesting resources from the CPU. How much this makes an impact on your decision to buy that VPS or not is up to you; many hosts dont make any preferences between packages whatsoever.
The other major benefit to a VPS is the extra control that you will have over your hosting. If youve managed to find someone who does hardware VPS then youll be able to pick your own OS as well hardware VPS essentially creates the VPS on a hardware level rather than a software level the good part; you can do whatever you like with your VPS the bad part; the hardware rather than shared is divided so instead of having the use of for instance a 2gHz processor and a guaranteed 256MB of RAM you get a .5gHz processor and a guaranteed 256 MB of RAM if 4 people are sharing your server. From here you can configure your hosting as you see fit customise your PHP settings install PHP x Zend whatever Hardy Heron and/or Peggle not recommended for a work environment. Even better as your VPS is essentially a Virtual Machine you can take snapshots of your entire VPS so your whole account can be backed up into a single file and then should something go horribly wrong you can use the snapshot to restore the VPS in its entirety.
VPS will of course cost more than Shared Hosting but on the flip side of the coin it is considerably cheaper than a Dedicated server. If performance is more of an issue for you than cost then a Dedicated is the way forward a VPS will never be able to command the amount of resources that a Dedicated server used for the same purpose can. But as a costeffective solution to providing a significant performance boost to your hosting as well as allowing yourself a greater degree of control VPS is hard to fault.
*Please note Ive been to Calcutta. Im not implying that the place is unsavoury disreputable or otherwise trying to smear the good name of Calcutta in any way it just seemed to round the sentence off nicely!
About the Author:
Ewan MacLeod works for NuBlue a UK based Web Agency that specialises in Web Design and Web Hosting.
About the writer: I work for NuBlue Web Solutions providing Web Hosting Design and Marketing services.
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