For many small businesses, virtual private servers are a good compromise between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting. Shared hosting is an excellent choice for businesses with small to medium sized websites that don’t anticipate getting high levels of traffic. Dedicated server hosting is often used by large businesses with substantial traffic levels. The dedicated server is not shared with anyone else, and the company often has complete control over it.
A physical server can be partitioned in a software sense into smaller units that virtually behave like servers themselves. They function independently in that they do not interact with each other. These virtual private servers give you the amenities of having a dedicated server but at less expense. Like shared hosting, you are sharing the same physical server with others. Unlike shared hosting, you are not sharing server resources. Instead, resources are set aside for your use and are available whether you use them or not.
Your virtual private server is isolated from other virtual servers so that they do not affect the performance of your website in any way. This isolation also enhances security because any problem that befalls a website in a neighboring virtual server won’t affect your website. Just like a dedicated server, you have complete control over your environment. You can install any software that you want, choose any operating system, and install any control panel that suits you.
A virtual private server is appropriate if you will be requiring a lot of server resources because of the type, size, purpose, and traffic levels of your website. Traffic affects resource usage of different websites in different ways. A static website that is mostly text with moderate sized images will be less resource intensive than a dynamic site that has large image galleries and hosts lots of videos.
If traffic will be downloading very large files, the resource demand will be even higher. Another consideration is that traffic levels rarely increase in a nice smooth incremental fashion. The traffic visiting a site can dramatically blow up to huge levels overnight because of a marketing promotion or because of the quirks of a search engine. This means it doesn’t hurt to plan conservatively with regard to your resource usage.
If you still have unanswered questions about virtual private server hosting and about whether it is right for you, please contact us.