What Is VPS Hosting? A Beginner’s Guide
VPS, or Virtual Private Server hosting, has become a popular web hosting solution for many websites and online businesses. It strikes an optimal balance between the affordability of shared hosting and the flexibility and control offered by dedicated servers.
This article will explain what VPS hosting is, how it works, its key benefits, and who should consider using VPS web hosting.
What is a VPS?
A VPS refers to a virtual machine that runs its copy of an operating system and functions like an independent VPS server. VPS hosting providers use virtualisation software to divide a physical server into multiple isolated VPS instances.
Each VPS gets allocated dedicated hardware resources like CPU cores, RAM, storage space and bandwidth. From a technical point of view, it operates exactly like a dedicated physical VPS server. However, the cost savings come from splitting resources efficiently among multiple VPS accounts.
How Does VPS Hosting Work?
The hosting provider instals hypervisor software on a physical VPS server. The hypervisor allows creation and running of virtual machines that use the resources of the underlying host VPS server.
For example, a VPS server with 8 CPU cores and 32GB of RAM can be portioned to run 8 VPS instances with 1 core and 4GB RAM each.
VPS independently runs its operating system copy, and the allocated hardware resources are not shared with other accounts on the VPS server. This isolation provides better performance and stability. Users also have full root access, which lets them run software however they want.
Advantages of VPS Hosting
Here are some of the main advantages of using VPS hosting in India:
- Performance and Reliability
With dedicated CPU, RAM and storage, VPS ensures consistently fast performance for websites. There is no resource contention with other accounts, giving reliable and predictable speeds.
- Flexibility and Customisation
VPS plans allow choosing desired operating systems like Linux or Windows. You also get full root access to install customised software as per your needs.
- Scalability
Scaling up VPS hosting is easy, unlike others, where you may have to switch plans and migrate data. VPS resources like RAM, storage and bandwidth can be upgraded easily to support traffic growth.
- Security
The isolated VPS environment provides improved security and prevents vulnerabilities in other accounts on the server from affecting your website. You can also implement additional security measures easily.
- Affordability
VPS offers dedicated-server-like performance and flexibility at a much lower cost. The VPS hosting price is typically much lower than the dedicated servers. The pricing scales well with growing resource needs.
Who is VPS Hosting Best Suited For?
VPS hosting works well for growing websites that need to scale resources to manage increasing traffic, web applications and SaaS platforms that require extensive customisation.
It is also preferred by eCommerce stores that need performance and security to handle transactions and startups and small businesses wanting the flexibility of dedicated servers at affordable shared hosting price points. Overall, the best VPS hosting provides an ideal middle ground between basic shared hosting and more expensive dedicated server hosting.
Conclusion
VPS hosting enables running websites and apps on isolated virtual machines allocated dedicated hardware resources from a physical server. This allows delivering the performance and flexibility comparable to dedicated servers at a much lower cost.
With its ability to provide guaranteed resources and enable customisation, VPS hosting is ideal for production workloads of growing websites and web applications.
