How to choose VPS (VDS)

A successful web project begins with finding an optimal hosting solution. If you want to create a web project and you are searching for a good yet cost-efficient foundation for it, then a VPS is definitely what you need.

In the following article, we will analyze the specificity of VPS hosting to assist you in making the right choice for your web business.

Main Features of Virtual Private Server

To get the principle of virtual private server operation and why we actually have it, it’s essential to have an idea of how other hosting services operate.

You certainly know that websites work because they are hosted on separate physical machines that are constantly running, transmitting the data over the global network, which are referred to as servers. Servers are often leased out by specialized companies since it’s much more convenient than if every site owner bought their own server and equipped a special room for it. Therefore the whole industry of web hosting exists. As for web hosting, we have two basic approaches to using a physical server unit – one way is to rent it out entirely to a single user. Another approach is to divide it between different customers – which results and services known as “dedicated hosting” and “shared hosting” respectively. Both approaches have their upsides and downsides.

Dedicated hosting provides a client with maximum performance and reliability and security of the website available. However, it’s also a rather expensive option. Since the capacities of a dedicated server often exceed the technical requirements of a regular site, such solutions are often cost-inefficient.

At the same time, shared hosting is an extremely cheap option, which is affordable even, say, to a poor student requiring it for their university projects. However, quality comes with the price, and here both parameters are rather low. When the service is shared between various customers, a strict allocation of resources is out of the question, so the hosting might work well or might work badly, and there is no way to predict it, let alone the fact of its higher susceptibility to hacking attacks. Even if this solution works alright for a school project or a small blog visited by ten persons a week, for a corporate site on which your revenues directly depend, such a level of service is not acceptable.

With this polarity in the price-quality ratio and the effort to reconcile the two approaches to server hosting, virtual private server hosting was probably born.

VPS hosting refers to a bunch of services made possible by means of virtualization technology. The latter, in turn, refers to various approaches to dividing a single physical server into several virtual units. There are two main types of virtualization – hardware virtualization and software virtualization, with dozens of solutions for each one. Virtualization could be a topic for a separate article, so for now we’ll confine ourselves to mentioning that hardware virtualization is considered a better option since it allows the division of resources on a deeper level, root-level, which provides more features and more flexibility, stability, and control for each virtual server. In particular, we use KVM virtualization, which according to our more than a decade of experience proved to be the best hardware virtualization available.

What VPS does is that it allows obtaining functionality similar to one of a dedicated server while sharing the capacities of a single physical machine. This means a combination of performance, control, stability, and reliability with an affordable price, which makes it the optimal solution for the vast majority of small- to medium-sized websites.

Virtual Server Offers

On HostZealot, you can find a broad selection of various VPS offers, with various features, configurations, and locations. If we have a look at the numbers, we offer VPS plans with parameters ranging from 2 Xeon Cores, 512 MB, and 10 GB SSD for €4.3/mo to VPS with 6 Xeon Cores, 16 GB, 150 GB SSD for €61.15/mo, with unlimited bandwidth included to any plan. As for further hardware options, you can also opt for HDD VPS if you need vast and cheap storage space, or for NVMe drives, that instead offer a lightning-fast speed even compared to SSD.

Furthermore, you can choose between a broad selection of operating systems: CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu Linux distributions, another popular Unix-like FreeBSD OS, or Windows Server, and you can as well install your own distribution by contacting our team.

As for locations, there are dozens of locations all over the globe to choose from including: Chicago, Seattle, Ashburn, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Stockholm, Limassol, Tel Aviv, Tallinn, Dallas, Hong Kong, and many more. The location has a great impact on the latency and hence on the SEO, so the right location is also an essential parameter.

As for other features, we offer quick provisioning, easy rescaling and customization, a free SSL certificate and free IPV6, control via VNC from anywhere in the world, a variety of control panels, and many more.

What is Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS)?

While studying different offers by various providers, you might have come across such a term as Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). To avoid confusion, we’ll say right away that VDS is basically a synonym for VPS, which is rather rarely and interchangeably used by various providers in order to refer to good old VPS. Some service providers probably do make a kind of distinction between these two terms, prescribing to VDS some features that make it more similar to a dedicated server, whatever that means, but the difference described is so subtle and occasional that it’s hardly relevant, and thus rather creates confusion among users. To end with this misconception once and for all, keep in mind that a VDS doesn’t differ from VPS. If it allegedly does, make sure to compare, what features this or that provider includes to their respective VPS and “VDS” plans.

Features of VPS

To make the benefits provided by VPS more transparent, let’s have a look at a couple of features that make this solution special.

Security

VPS server is a secure solution. There first reason why is that the quantity of resources is continuous, therefore errors and downtime caused by simultaneous resource abuse performed by numerous neighbors is excluded.

Also, on shared hosting, a breach in the security of one user means a breach in the security of the entire “neighborhood”, that is, a hacker that hacked one of the sites hosted on shared hosting is capable of hacking other users more easily.

The third reason for VPS's higher security is the fact you get a fully customizable virtual environment. With that, you have full control over your virtual server’s security and can invest in it as much as possible. Dedicated IP and SSL certificates are also useful for ensuring a secure connection to the visitors of your website.

Resources control

With VPS, you receive the exact number of capacities included in your plan. With this you are able to adjust this quantity as you see fit. Later on, you can rescale this number if you need to change it. With VPS hosting this process is rather transparent and very convenient, so the number of resources will hardly be trouble.

Control panel

The control panel is another feature of VPS. The control panel is a software solution used to configure your server. It’s responsible for various tasks that comprise the administration of a server: managing domain names, hosting packages, monitoring resources, installing software, working with databases, managing files, managing email accounts, and creating databases just to name a few. So, opting for VPS also allows you to configure various aspects of your server.

Managed vs. Unmanaged VPS

With VPS you receive a high level of control over your web projects. But you can also choose, how much to control. This is provided by the “Managed VPS” service. In a nutshell, instead of configuring your server by yourself, you can just pay your hosting provider for taking over this task. If saving time is a higher priority for you than money, you can feel free to check the managed VPS offer by your hosting provider.

Uptime and reliability

The VPS is a service that can provide you with the maximum uptime for being almost as stable and reliable as a dedicated server. Uptime is a crucial aspect of your website's performance. It goes without saying that your visitors have to be able to access your website at any time. Furthermore, uptime has a dramatic effect on search engine optimization. In short, always seek 99,99 uptime when searching for a suitable VPS plan.

How to choose an appropriate VPS plan to fit your needs?

Albeit this is probably the main question of this article, it’s impossible to answer it at once. Your requirements play a crucial role, and you have to calculate them on your own. Earlier in the article, we mentioned the variety of HostZealot VPS plans. After all, we offer 6 “builds” whereas the cheapest one is suitable for tiny websites while the most expensive one is suitable for big projects. With a small personal blog, a site with a small amount of static content, or a landing page, the cheapest plan with 2 Xeon Cores, 512 MB, and 10 GB SSD will be more than enough. A small e-commerce site will probably require the second or third option. Bigger sites with lots of content, especially dynamic content, hundreds of visitors per day, and dozens of pages will probably need even the sixths option with 6 Xeon Cores, 16 GB, and 150 GB SSD if not a dedicated server. These requirements should be calculated when the website is already written and prepared for launch. Also, you should take into consideration the amount of capacity that will be necessary to handle expected traffic peaks, to avoid eventual crashes.

But probably you shouldn’t worry too much about finding the perfect plan at once. It’s essential to have enough resources for the site's successful operation, but a good VPS provider will always offer convenient rescaling options, so changing the number of resources to suit your needs as soon as your website feels the urge for it, will be available.

Conclusion

VPS is a perfect solution for most different kinds of websites. There are lots of things to take into account to it, but we hope all the necessary ones were mentioned for you to find the optimal solution. If any questions remain you can contact us via the live chat, and we wish you a successful choice of server as well as a successful development of your web project.