What is a VPS?

If you are familiar with the web hosting industry you may have heard of the term VPS or VDS. VPS means Virtual Private Server and VDS means Virtual Dedicated Server. Both are essentially the same thing with just a different name. A VPS is described as some by a stepping stone between a shared hosting account and a dedicated server. When websites experience traffic growth their shared providers often email the owner and tell them their account is consuming too many resources to be on a shared account. The recommendation in the past was to use a dedicated server. In a lot of cases a dedicated server can be overkill for a website which is slowly growing.

You need a VPS

The answer to the problem is a VPS which is a system that divides a dedicated server in to a group of mini or virtual servers each running their own operating system and each having the ability to be independently rebooted. VPS accounts are more stable then a shared account because specific resources are assigned for your usage such as RAM and processing power. This allows you more resources then a shared account, but not as much as a dedicated server, and is perfect for a medium sized website experiencing some growth.

How a VPS Works

A VPS runs an operating system such as Windows Server 2003 or a flavour of Linux and boots the normal way. Once booted a program runs which then boots the virtual servers from a disk image. Once the virtual servers are booted, they can be assigned to users to log in to via RDP or SSH and the end user will see the server as though he has his own dedicated box. Software based VPS’s suit hosting more because the resources can be adjusted on the fly through the master server allowing a user to have more resources instantly given to his account for incidences where a Digg happens or where the site has outgrown the first VPS plan on a host. Virtuozzo from SWSoft is an example of software which can run VPS nodes.

Other Uses

As well as bridging the gap between cheaper shared accounts and expensive dedicated servers a VPS account is an ideal way of setting up a live production server and a test server both on the same dedicated server. If you want to test something on the test server and you make a mistake and mess up the OS then a quick restore or re creation of the test VPS account can take place.

Advantages for the Web Host

When managing a shared hosting cluster you often come in to problems that you might have a few hundred domains on one web server. Modern hardware and software can easily cope with a high number of low traffic hosted domains, but occasionally the problem of a sites growth on the server happens and that particular website in the shared environment might turn viral and suddenly gain a lot of traffic. When this happens the shared server can grind to a halt which upsets the other shared users. With a VPS the host has the ability to set RAM limits and burst RAM limits. If a VPS is found to burst for too long then the VPS’s processes can automatically be killed so that performance of the other VPS accounts on the server are not jeopardized. This is perfect for all others on the server as they do not see any performance problems on their VPS. This makes your account more like a dedicated server where you only need to worry about your self. This in turn keeps support requests lower for the web host as only the 1 site is effected and not all as on a shared server.

Conclusion

A VPS account is the perfect and cheap way of getting your own Virtual Dedicated Server. It bridges a big gap between a shared host and dedicated (expensive) option. TechAsis currently runs on a VPS account due to other high traffic sites which are operated by us, and I personally enjoy the ability to tweak what I want, but not pay out a few hundred dollars a month for a dedicated server which would currently be overkill.