What Is The Best Thing About VPS Hosting?

A common question to ask, and yet a hard one to answer, is what is the best thing about VPS hosting? Virtual Private Servers have a number of features that distinguish them from other hosting solutions, and singling out the best feature is somewhat difficult. So after some careful consideration here’s what I consider to be the answer to that question.
Flexibility. Yup, that’s it. The flexibility. So let’s have a look at what this means and explain why it’s the best thing about VPS hosting.

VPS vs. Shared Hosting

First, we’ll start by thinking about traditional shared web hosting, something that many of us have used over the years for hosting websites. Generally, when you sign up with a web host, they’ll put you on a server with a number of other customers websites, and you’ll all use the same web server software, same versions of database software, and the same versions of software such as PHP. If your site or application needs something custom, such as a specific module for PHP, you may find that the host won’t want to install that for you. You are also forced to put up with this software being upgraded as part of the web host’s schedule rather than yours. In addition, you have the issue that should another customer on the same server come under attack or start using significant resources on the server, then your website can be affected.

Flexibility and Control

With a VPS you are in charge of the software on the server, so you have the luxury of being able to install the software that you need to make your website or application work for you. You can also upgrade your software packages on your own terms, allowing you to thoroughly test things and avoid any surprises that may come from those upgrades. If you want to use your server for something other than a website such as a VPN endpoint, a game server or email server, then that can be done too. You also have the ability to configure the security of the server to meet your needs and don’t need to worry about other customers overloading your server.
Now it’s not just a Virtual Private Server that offers this advantage: a dedicated server can offer you the same flexibility in the use of your server vs shared hosting. That being said, unless you require a lot of processing power on your server then a dedicated server can be quite an expensive proposition, and a VPS also has a level of flexibility that a dedicated server can’t offer you.

Affordable

For example, you can delete and redeploy a VPS quickly and automatically to try out different configurations when performing your initial deployment. This is something that some dedicated server hosts may provide, though many would require tickets raising with support to have the server operating system reloaded. Where the flexibility really trumps a dedicated server, though, is the ability to upgrade your server’s resources on the fly. While a reboot may sometimes be required for your OS to pick up the change, that is all the downtime that will be required to up or downgrade your VPS. This means you can increase the RAM or processor power of your server, or decrease it to meet your needs. While with a dedicated server this will often require scheduling downtime with a support team who will perform changes to the server, this will take longer, and would be more awkward to reverse. The killer blow is that with a cloud VPS your server can be automatically recovered in the event of a hardware failure that could put a dedicated server offline for some time as the Virtual Private Server is not tied to the underlying hardware.
So there you have it, if you need flexibility in your hosting then a VPS is what you need, as they have it in spades.