When talking about website hosting, people usually think of shared hosting—the cheapest and most standard option, which is suitable for most small and medium-sized websites. Shared hosting is like living in an apartment with roommates. Sure, everyone has their own room, but there's no complete separation between the people in the apartment, and some resources are shared. There is no doubt that it is possible to get along and live this way, but what happens when one of the roommates decides to throw loud parties in their room every night? Or when they eat all the food in the fridge? In fact, this is one of the main disadvantages of shared hosting – your website is on the same server as many others, and this can cause various problems.
In the past, the only solution available was a dedicated server—a physical server that is entirely yours, with no partners. While this is a high-quality and effective solution, it is very expensive and requires special maintenance, and not every business can afford this type of website hosting.
A Virtual Private Server is the ideal solution for those who need a relatively powerful hosting infrastructure but do not want to pay the high prices of a dedicated server (and, as mentioned, cannot settle for shared hosting). A virtual server provides an experience similar to a dedicated server, is easier to operate, and is offered at a reasonable and affordable price. The technology allows you to take one powerful server, divide it among several users, and allocate resources separately for each user. In other words, you do not share resources with other tenants on the server (which is why it is called a private server). This way, costs are lower, but you still enjoy private storage space, which allows for better performance for websites that need more storage space or stronger CPU performance, and also have to deal with significantly more traffic than smaller websites.
Virtual server - advantages
Who is a private virtual server suitable for, and when should you choose this type of hosting? Here are a few parameters:
Reliability and availability
Shared hosting can be like dominoes - when one falls, they all fall. It's true that with good hosting companies, you'll hardly ever have to deal with server malfunctions caused by other users' misuse, but if you run a popular website, your users won't be patient with crashes and downtime, even if they're very short.
VPS hosting, or a virtual server, means that the resources defined on the server are yours alone, and you are not dependent on other users' malfunctions or problems. In fact, a virtual server significantly improves the reliability and availability of your website, saving you time dealing with malfunctions that are not related to you.
Immediate and quick upgrade option
Running a huge campaign? Got a big content site ad? Are hordes of visitors flooding your site and you need to increase resources to prevent it from crashing? Virtual server hosting allows for immediate and quick server upgrades—increasing capacity, memory, and processors is easy and simple, allowing you to boost your site's performance as needed.
Good infrastructure for e-commerce sites
Proper website operation is important, regardless of the type of website, but when it comes to e-commerce websites (online stores), the importance is doubled. No one wants to lose a sale because of a website crash or slow performance. Users are impatient with glitches or e-commerce sites that don't work. If you are setting up an online store, you should choose hosting on a private virtual server, which will provide you with good performance, speed, and peace of mind.
VPS is also good for security
When you host your website on a virtual server, you are better protected from attacks and security breaches that can occur on a shared hosting server, because you are hosted separately from other users. With shared hosting, a hacked website can also pose a threat to other websites hosted on the same server, but with private virtual hosting, this risk does not exist. This means that you are not dependent on the caution of other users on the server, and the security of your website depends mainly on the actions you take yourself.