It’s no small task figuring out everything that goes into a successful website – putting together the plan, designing it and making sure everything works properly are big decisions to make.
Sometimes people forget to answer a very important question until it’s too late, though – what kind of web hosting is right for my site, my audience and my needs? Sometimes, the answer is easy – if all you’re doing is sharing pictures of your cats, then a shared hosting plan is probably enough for you. Similarly, if you’re sure you’ve got the next facebook on your hands, then you’ve probably already forgot a whole room of dedicated servers lined up.
But what’s best if you have a site with several databases, an e-commerce platform and a need for root access? Luckily, there’s a third option that might be a great fit for your needs – VPS web hosting , or Virtual Private Server hosting, can be a great solution for a site that needs room to grow.
Below are five reasons why you may want to look into a VPS:
- Room To Grow/Scalability – Shared hosting is usually plenty for those who are just starting off online – it usually has enough resources, and the managed support can help you learn as you go. But usually the goal of any site is to grow, either by increasing traffic or by adding additional sites, and that’s when shared hosting can be a little confining. Whether your site is a blog, portfolio or an e-commerce hub, a VPS can give you the room your site needs.
- SSH/Root Access – If you like to customize the way your server runs, you can forget about using a shared plan. No hosting company in their right mind would let you have root access to the server – they would be risking the uptime of hundreds or thousands of other customers if you made am mistake. That’s a great reason to get a VPS. With it, you can have server-level customization if you need it. You won’t need to get a dedicated server to get it, and you won;t harm any other sites that don’t belong to you in the process.
- Unplanned Traffic – It’s every blogger’s dream – an article you spent some serious time on gets submitted to Digg and starts bringing huge amounts of traffic to your site. But can your site (and your hosting plan) handle it? A VPS can! Because many VPS have “burstable memory” – that is, a pool of shared memory to draw during times of extraordinary traffic – your site can handle getting linked to with the best of them.
- Taking Care of Business – If your website is your livelihood, then you don’t want to run the risk of your site going down because someone else on your server is using up all the resources. This happens frequently on shared hosting, but not so much on a VPS. Your site only shares CPU with other sites – all the other resources are yours. Plus, while the typical shared server hosts thousands of individual plans, a VPS not only has fewer sites on it, but those that share a machine are separate from each other.
- Save Money – A VPS is so attractive because it costs so much less than a dedicated server, but can do so much more than a shared hosting plan. Some people think that the only two options are shared hosting or dedicated servers; once you look into a VPS, though, you’ll say goodbye to shared hosting without saying goodbye to all your hard-earned money.