VPS Hosting and Running Your Own World
If you’ve decided that you’ve outgrown the ‘plain vanilla’ of shared web hosting solutions, but don’t want to pay the full rental charges for a web hosting server dedicated to you and you alone; then the Virtual Private Server (VPS) may be a good comprise. In this model, the physical resources of the server’s processors: memory, disk space, and network bandwidth, are partitioned out between several logical servers. Your logical server, meaning your virtual private server, runs independently and has exclusive use of its slice of the total system resources. You also have extended administration possibilities for your VPS.
How Much Hosting Pie Do You Want?
To understand how big a slice of the physical server you need, start by adding up the total disk space you’ll need. Remember that because a VPS is your own ‘world’, there is often no restriction on the number of separate domains and websites you can run. Next, check up on the amount of data you are likely to send out from your VPS. Website pages types and sizes, together with expected visitors and downloads are the factors to take into account. The number of processors and the main memory are more difficult to gauge. You may need to make an educated guess, and be prepared to upgrade your VPS solution if required. Hosting providers now provide menu-driven solutions that let you pick the different dimensions of your VPS and also see how the price varies as you increase or decrease your web hosting resources.
Open or Not So Open Hosting
Next, decide if you have a preference for a virtual private server running in a Microsoft Windows Server or a Linux environment, typically the main two possibilities offered. Note that the provider may also offer a web hosting administration application with a graphical user interface. In this case, the choice between Microsoft or Linux may simply come down to a matter of price, as the administration GUI will make the underlying operating system less visible and (hopefully) your web hosting easier.
Starting Web Hosting Administration
Running your own VPS world gives you the freedom and the resources to do more than when you use a basic shared hosting solution. It also means certain responsibilities. One of these is to ensure that your virtual server is up and running. Although server technology is improving all the time, there’s always a chance that your virtual server will crash. Whereas in shared website hosting, providers may run health checks and reboot their servers as required, for a VPS this becomes your duty. Luckily, administration interfaces like Plesk that run both under Windows and Linux have easy-to-use commands to restart your web-hosting if it stops. For more advanced users, there are also possibilities to automatically restart the VPS at regular intervals, for example, every morning at 5am (!).
Power at Last!
You also get to play ‘ruler of the realm’ by deciding how much of your total slice of resources you will allocate to the different websites hosted by your VPS, as well as the number of email addresses attached to each domain name. The possibilities in hosting administration applications provided as part of a VPS solution can be extensive. They cover security rules, additional software program installations, server statistics, database set-up (for example, for holding product catalog information) and making backups of your websites. Deciding these things for yourself can be very satisfying; just make sure you take the time to see at least how the basics work so that under your administration, your VPS world not only survives, but also thrives!
