How to Choose a VPS or Virtual Private Server

The term VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and indicates a particular web hosting solution designed for the customers who need a more powerful solution than conventional shared hosting plans. The VPS is a server dedicated to all intents and purposes, the only difference compared to a normal physical server is that it is a virtual machine with its own dedicated resources.

VPS is completely confined within the system, so that each customer has dedicated resources, as stated by the provider and has full access to the system, with the ability to install software and make changes if the system is already in place.

This article tells you how to proceed to select a VPS to suit your needs, going to see the most common solutions in the market, based respectively on Xen / KVM, VMware and Virtuozzo. Cloud Server are products that are technically not covered by the traditional characteristics of a VPS. But from function its actually the same, in fact a level up.

How to Choose a VPS or Virtual Private Server : Reasons why you should opt for a VPS ?

VPS is the ideal choice for customers who host multiple websites or needs to have guaranteed performance : the ability to assign guaranteed resources, such as RAM and CPU to have more visits on their websites, compared to a normal web hosting plan. This is because the web server, database and other services on the dedicated server, they can access exclusively to system resources, providing the possibility that the configurations of the system can be optimized for the traffic of their websites. The VPS allows you to install software as needed, but most of them has a control panel such as Plesk, DirectAdmin, cPanel or other products for the management of web sites and all their settings.

These panels appear to be very comfortable because they allow you to manage individual domains in all their aspects: creating new spaces, databases, email accounts, autoresponders, managing spam filters and all that is usually necessary for the administration of the system but they sucks the system resources themselves.

In addition, these panels also allow access to more people with different levels of access and consequent privileges, leaving so that individual web spaces within the VPS can be resold to third party customers, as in the case of webagency that develop web sites for their customers. A VPS, however, has other advantages : Each VPS is assigned one or more dedicated IP, these allow you to install SSL certificates to support e-commerce sites or websites where there is a need to have a secure connection, just because data is stored sensitive.

The dedicated IP allows to reach the VPS unambiguously and is then uniquely assigned to that VPS, as in the case of any dedicated server in the network. Many customers purchase a VPS to reduce costs and focus the number of websites in one location, rather than having multiple websites around the web, in various companies of different webhosting packages and shared hosting.

How to Choose a VPS or Virtual Private Server

To choose the right VPS solution is useful to know first your needs. In this field, we usually find that VPS are virtualized platform Parallels Virtuozzo / Containers, KVM or Xen. The virtualization platform may be irrelevant for the purposes of choice for most customers, is in fact the type of software that the webhosting provider uses to operate the VPS, but affects performance in some cases. Parallels Virtuozzo is definitely one of the favorites for the creation of environments that are designed to VPS web hosting: In fact, this platform allows you to get great performance and reduced consumption of resources for the provision of websites and good insulation is obtainable at the operating system level for the host virtual machines.

We speak then of VMware: This name is one of the market leader in virtualization platforms, but its use is not always necessary in an environment of webhosting, and for this reason the VPS based on this platform have a higher cost, as usually used for mission critical applications rather than for specific host software.

KVM is a virtualization system as strong today used in many platforms. Unlike Parallels Virtuozzo, is an open source solution, like XEN. The VPS created on these platforms allow a virtualization management equally optimal in the case of webhosting and may, in some cases, also be indicated for the execution of real applications and generally for a purpose which goes beyond the webhosting of sites web.