Throughout this blog and future blogs, we’ll be examining a number of factors that will help you decide on the type of web hosting that’s best suited to your website. With this handy guide in-hand, we hope choosing a VPS Hosting Provider becomes a more methodical process, instead of a guessing game. We’ll be covering the following topics and discussing how AppliedI’s VPS offerings fit into the big picture over the next several weeks.
- Server Performance
- Scalability & Growth
- Technical Support
- Security & Networking
- Uptime SLAs
Before we begin delving into the nuances of choosing a virtual server, let’s take a look at why you’re interested in acquiring a VPS server. We find the vast majority of our customers leveraging virtuali servers made the decision out of a need to improve their website’s performance and/or scale with their site’s growth.
VPS / Cloud Servers generally outperform even traditional shared hosting, even if it’s augmented by a CDN like CloudFlare and caching plugins. If you’re considering a VPS or Cloud Server (the two terms are used here interchangeably), you should see an improvement in your website’s performance. If you happen to upgrade from shared hosting to virtual server and your website’s performance hasn’t improved, we suggust examining the nuts-and-bolts of your new server.
The following chart illustrates the breakdown of performance that you can expect from various types of web hosting platforms.
| Shared Hosting | VPS / Cloud Servers | Dedicated Servers | |
| Performance | Good | Better | Best |
| Economy | Best | Better | Good |
In short, VPS / Cloud Servers strike an excellent balance between cost and performance. As mentioned above, adding caching and a CDN to your website can help further improve on your website’s performance at a minimal cost.
1. Server Performance
The quality of the hardware used to host your website is, and always will be, one of the most important factors in determining the performance of your website. If you’re in the market for a high-performance hosting package, taking a step back from bargain-basement pricing and looking at the nuts-and-bolts is an excellent starting point.
We don’t advise that you base your entire decision on a server’s CPU or RAM, but your website’s performance will be at least partially dependent on the quality of the server you acquire. Carefully weigh your website’s potential as a revenue generating machine against an added monthly premium that often amounts to the cost of a Netflix subscription.
Using the latest Intel processors to serve your website goes a long way to providing a high-quality user experience. SSD Accelerated storage is also an important factor in improving performance because AppliedI’s SSD (Solid-State drives) enable quick content retrieval via content caching without the time-consuming spinning that goes into traditional disk requests. Think of SSD drives as the physical version of database caching with W3TotalCache or WinCache. Regardless of the hosting provider you choose, SSD accelerated storage will likely improve your website’s performance.
As you take some time to weigh the pros-and-cons of choosing VPS hosting, we hope the preceding blog post is both helpful and relevant. In future blogs, we’ll be examining additional factors including the importance of scalability, an experienced technical support team, iron-clad security and uptime.
Interested in VPS Hosting?
AppliedI offers high-performance VPS Hosting on the Windows Server platform featuring an industry leading 60-Day Money-Back guarantee, 100% uptime SLA and a 24/7 US-Based support team. To learn more about VPS Hosting through AppliedI, Contact Us for more information.