What is VPS and what can I do with it?

VPS is a Virtual Private Server, which means it is a solution emulating full-scale dedicated server, yet it costs significantly less. This is achieved by dividing a dedicated server into packages with the help of virtualization technology.

Read this below.

To host a website you need to have its content located on a web server, so that customers can access it. Different websites have different requirements - while a small portfolio site uses little resources, forum with active community and plenty of threads can be having thousands of visits daily. If these threads contain lots of pictures and video, such forum will require a lot more traffic as compared to web hosting package. However, if renting your own dedicated server is not yet possible (or not needed), using a VPS package might be the best way out.

VPS hosting is one of the most popular types of hosting service. This hosting solution is best described as your own apartment in a house. You have full control over your part of server resources, can re-install your operating system and control panel. You have a separate IP address range, have your own ports for using different services, which do not interact with OS, IP addresses and ports of other users in the node.

VPS packages can be used for many purposes:

• Hosting websites
• Reselling services
• Creating VPN servers
• Hosting game servers
• Creating backup storages, etc.

VPS package grants control over significantly higher amount of resources as compared to web hosting packages. It also allows you using a variety of OS like Windows, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu and others. Moreover, you can order a certain control panel (DirectAdmin, WHM, ISP Manager, etc.) to operate your VPS and manage it easily. Control panels provide convenient GUI as well as enabling creation and management of user accounts for your VPS package.

Unlike web hosting, server resources are not shared uncontrollably. Each package comes with certain quantity of CPU cores, RAM volume, disk size, bandwidth and traffic volume. These resources are actually owned by the dedicated server, which holds your VPS node and their allocation to each package is supervised by virtualization system.

HostZealot Hosting utilizes KVM virtualization system. Its main benefit is the fact that you always have access to the exact amount of resources you paid for.

What is a VPS vulnerable to and what should you be aware of? VPS provides more resources than a web hosting package, yet using certain software may require more than your package can provide. This may lead to lagging or complete halt of operations until VPS is rebooted.

To avoid this, we recommend optimizing your existing software, keeping it up to date and avoiding installing scripts, add-ons and packages from unknown sources. Using unverified software can lead to complete loss of your data. To avoid this, we recommend doing regular backups and storing them on a separate storage. HostZealot Hosting also provides this service to our clients.

We will describe the process of setting up a VPS soon, so stay tuned for updates!