Since the dawn of the Internet, websites have typically been hosted on either a shared hosting environment, where one machine serves up pages for hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of sites, and dedicated hosting, where the site lives on its own server. A website that lives on a dedicated server owns and controls all the machine resources; in contrast, a site that runs in a shared environment must compete with every other site for cpu, disk, memory and network resources.
Although significantly more expensive than a shared hosting account, a dedicated server obviously offers the greatest amount of flexibility and performance. When properly configured, these servers can really give some pop to site performance, making shared hosting, by comparison, seem anemic, which it often is.
For many site owners, the sole factor behind their hosting decisions is price. The most inexpensive dedicated servers can cost $100/mo to operate, while a shared hosting account is but a fraction of that.
But what if you have a beer budget and champagne performance requirements? Is there middle ground? The answer to that question is a resounding, yes, and it comes in the form of a VPS, which stands for Virtual Private Server.
A VPS can best be described as a machine-within-a-machine. One very powerful physical server is sub-divided into virtual slices by a hypervisor program, such as VMWare or Xen. Each of these slices boots and runs its own copy of an operating system and is allocated its own dedicated memory, disk, and CPU resources. For example, a sixteen-core (core=CPU) physical server might be divided into sixteen separate Virtual Private Servers.
Running a VPS provides nearly all the benefits one would expect from a dedicated server but without the cost. A basic VPS package from RimuHosting, for example, might cost as little as $20/mo, which is little more than you’d pay for a shared hosting account elsewhere. But in exchange for the slight increase in cost, you get a server that
- Provides much better overall performance because it has dedicated resources. In particular, database performance can be dramatically better, turning a slug of a site into a jaguar
- Provides root access, which means you can tune it for maximum performance and control what software (and which version) is installed
- Can have additional memory or disk capacity added quickly – usually as quickly as you can reboot the machine.
- Is generally more secure: Though your server shares machine resources with other virtual machines, they run in isolation, as if there were a brick wall between them.
- Lets you run more than one website
The only real downside to a VPS is that, unless you have a managed VPS plan, you are generally responsible for all server management yourself. It is the provider’s job to ensure that you get the resources you’re paying for and that the machine is running. Beyond that, you’re going to be wearing the administrators hat. (Some hosting firms do provide additional assistance, though it isn’t guaranteed. One of the reasons, among many, that I’ve chosen RimuHosting to host this blog is that they do, in fact, go the extra mile, and for that I’m a grateful customer.)
In short, if your site needs more oomph and you can’t afford to shell out the money for a dedicated server, the VPS is probably going to give you what you need, as long as you don’t mind being the system administrator.
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