What Is Virtual Private Server?

Virtual Private Server or VPS are a little complicated to understand by common people as compared to dedicated severs, usually because dedicated servers are most commonly known as private computer kept at a Datacenter. VPS are quite a bit different from dedicated servers in a way that instead of running a single hosting account or website on one high configuration server, many small or mid configuration servers can be built on it which will share a single server. This definition of VPS server may lead to confusion in many people mind that what’s the difference between a VPS and shared web hosting. This is a fair enough question to ask, there may be variation regarding this question depending upon whom you ask.

The most basic answer that can be given is that shared hosting can come with unlimited bandwidth per month and some companies provide unlimited web space too, but there is no information regarding the amount of memory or CPU power usage that you can consume. This makes it extremely difficult to host large memory and CPU consuming sites such as Drupal sites, Joomla sites and many other CRM’s. Addition to this you don’t have freedom to install custom modules or software required by your websites. Shared Server comes with standard modules with cpanel as custom modules may cause issues to other shared hosting accounts. VPS Servers help the web developers to get allocation of required resources according to need of high end web projects and also guarantee an uptime of 24 x 7. Many VPS hosting providers also offer burst resources that assure no downtime even if there is over usage of resources.

VPS hosting gives you total control over the server and various other aspects of the VPS as well. VPS hosting allow direct root access of operating system installed so you can make required changes yourself such as changing configuration files, installing additional custom modules etc. You can reboot your server any time on a single click if required. If something went wrong you can reinstall the operating system from the control panel that comes with Virtual Private Server. Some providers also give backup and restore facility with the VPS hosting so that you can take backup of the server time to time and restore it if something went wrong.

Shared Hosting is good for hosting simple websites that consume minimal resources while for high end web projects it’s advised to get a VPS fulfill your requirements in minimal budget. If a web hosting company provides a VPS hosting with 1 GHz processor and 512 MB of Ram and 50 GB of Hard drive, this doesn’t mean that these resources are divided but are allocated for your website only, so you can get maximum resources for your projects. There are various technologies that are used for creating VPS such as XEN, KVM, VMware, Open VZ, HVM etc. XEN and Open VZ are less stable as compared to VMware. While renting a VPS hosting from a web hosting company always clarify certain aspects such as number of core of CPU, burst ram, bandwidth, number of IP’s can be used as this information help you to use server without any problem in long run.