Virtual Private Server Hosting
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the benefits and features of a dedicated server without the cost? That’s what you get with virtual private server hosting.
VPS hosting combines virtual server technology with shared web hosting to create a totally private hosting environment while sharing the resources of a single physical machine with other users.
Virtual Server Technology
Virtual machines are everywhere these days, so it’s no surprise that they’ve made their way into hosting plans as well. A virtual machine (VM) is software that precisely emulates the features of a physical machine so that operating system and application software can run within the virtual environment without realizing that it isn’t running on a “real” machine. If you’re a Macintosh user you may have used VM technology to run Windows applications on OS X, for example. Software developers often use VMs for testing code in different environments.
Virtual machines are also a great way to better utilize physical server resources. It’s rare to find servers that are being used at full capacity, especially these days with multi-core and/or multi-processor machines. Running multiple virtual machines on one physical machine is a great way to not waste that horsepower.
And virtual machines are totally compartmentalized — nothing that happens in one virtual server affects the other virtual servers running on the same physical machine. This is what makes VM technology private — it’s like you have a dedicated server all to yourself, even though in reality you’re sharing a computer with others. Which is why it works well as an alternative to traditional shared web hosting.
Shared vs. Dedicated Hosting
A typical shared hosting environment consists of a physical machine running the Linux operating system. Root (administrative) access to the system is only available to the web hosting service provider, who configures the machine. Everyone else is given one or more user accounts on the system, each of which maps to at least one domain. So there might be anywhere from 20 to 100 domains being hosted on the same physical machine with shared hosting. Maybe more if reseller hosting is enabled (where clients of the hosting company can sell the company’s hosting services to others without the latter’s direct involvement).
Shared hosting is very efficient from the service provider’s viewpoint because they can fit so many domains onto a single system. But it also requires careful administration so that no one user (account/domain) hogs too much of the processor or bandwidth. It also requires that essentially the same configuration applies to each user on the system, because there is only one web server being used to service all those different accounts. And there are potential security issues — a security exploit on one of the domains can easily spread to affect other domains on the same server.
One way to avoid these downsides is to switch to dedicated hosting, where an entire physical machine is dedicated solely to a single user. That user gets root access and essentially total control of the machine’s configuration. But it’s pricey, because the hosting service has to purchase and install a new machine for each new dedicated hosting client and they can’t spread the cost of running the hardware among tens of different users.
Shared Yet Dedicated Hosting
That’s where virtual private server hosting comes into play. VPS hosting is a hybrid of the shared and dedicated hosting models. Clients get a dedicated virtual machine at their disposal, with root access and the ability to alter the configuration. But two or more VPS systems will run on the same physical machine, lowering costs for both the VPS clients and the hosting service.
There are downsides, of course, chief being that clients get less disk space than they would with a comparable shared hosting plan (because each virtual server needs its own copy of the server software) and that their use of the machine’s resources is throttled (so that virtual servers can run unimpeded by what is happening in other virtual servers on the same physical machine). But if you’re frustrated by the inflexibility of your current shared hosting plan, or you’re regularly exceeding your plan’s resource usage limits, you just might want to consider switching to virtual private server hosting.