In the beginning, shared hosting is perfect suitable for most people. But as you start making money with your sites and start getting a decent amount of traffic, it might be time to switch over to Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. It’s just more reliable than shared hosting and it doesn’t cost an arm or a leg either.
With a VPS, a single web server is partitioned by virtualization software to make it appear as multiple virtual servers. Probably the most common virtualization software that you will encounter with VPS hosting is the Parallels Virtuozzo software.
Unlike with shared hosting, each virtual server is completely independent from the other virtual servers. So what happens on one virtual server will not affect anything on yours. You also get your own dedicated resources like CPU, memory, diskspace and bandwidth. How much you get, depends on the type of plan you choose.
In general, this makes VPS hosting much more stable than shared hosting. You no longer have to worry about what other customers are doing on your server because you’re now completely isolated from everyone else. With shared hosting, it is not uncommon for your site to go down, because some random customer ran some script that took down the entire server. This won’t happen on a VPS.
Performance is also much better because you have your own dedicated resources. This should lead to faster load times of your sites. Normally your server has a guaranteed amount of RAM available for your use. However, your server also has access to Burstable RAM. This is made available to your server whenever you are experiencing an increase of traffic over your guaranteed amounts. This is useful for handling unexpected, but temporary traffic surges.
You will also enjoy more flexibility with VPS hosting. Since it’s your own virtual server, you can choose the operating system and software you want to run on it. You’ll get root access to your account which allows you to have complete control over your server. If you ever have issues with your server, you can also reboot your server yourself from your control panel. There’s no need to submit a support ticket to handle the request.
As you can see, there are many benefits to getting VPS hosting. If you start to feel you are outgrowing your current shared hosting plan, make sure to include VPS hosting as one of your choices.
