So You've Decided To Use A VPS For Hosting – What Next?
If you’re new to hosting and after some deliberation you have chosen VPS hosting, or if you are upgrading to a VPS from shared hosting, this decision is just the beginning of the journey. There are a number of things to consider before you even launch your first VPS, which we will run through here.
Welcome to VPS!
The first question is: what are you planning to do with it? Is it for a blog, a forum for a community you are part of, an ecommerce site for your business, or just a gallery for your holiday photos? The answer to this question has a bearing on the software you’ll need to have running on your VPS. Most website software will give you an idea of the requirements you need to meet in order to use it. In general, this refers to any other software that is needed to make it work, such as the Apache web server, PHP or other script languages that the software may be written in, and any required database software such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. These normally won’t mention how much RAM, disk space or how powerful a CPU your server will need as these things are normally very dependent upon how many simultaneous visitors your site attracts and how large your databases are. Often the software creators will give a number of guides or tutorials on how to get the website software running on many common operating systems.
Choosing An OS
With the software selected and an idea of which operating system you may need, it’s time to consider how many resources to assign to your VPS, and whether to go cloud or SSD. A cloud VPS is a fair bit more expensive than an SSD VPS, but the advantage of being in a cloud means is that it is not tied to any one piece of hardware, thus preventing hardware failures incurring your server any prolonged periods of downtime. With our SSD VPS offering, the plans are arranged around how much RAM you will need, and any scaling up of the CPU and disk provision should you increase the amount of RAM. With the cloud VPS, things are more flexible as alongside the main bundle of CPU/RAM/storage allocations you can also add extra storage or RAM to the VPS to meet your needs. For a starting site there’s no need to go big straight away; with a VPS running Linux and a web server you should be able to get by on a 0.5GB to 1GB RAM VPS without any problem. You can increase these resources as the site becomes more popular. For a Windows server, you will likely want to start with 1GB RAM to 2GB RAM for things to run smoothly.
Ready To Launch!
Once you’ve selected the operating system you need and the specification of the server you want, it’s then just a case of naming it and launching the server so you can then configure it. Most software packages you are likely to need usually come with some tutorial guides on how to get started. These can be great for helping you pick the operating system that you want to run on your VPS, as well as walking you through how to get your software up and running. One of the greatest features of a VPS is the speed at which you can fire up a VPS from scratch. This means that you can easily launch a VPS to test a configuration, and if you aren’t happy with the setup you can destroy the existing one and launch a replacement in minutes. When you are starting out, you can practice launching repeated VPSs, allowing you to learn and get your deployment just right.
Once you are happy with your setup and site, you can then announce it to the world and watch the traffic come into your site running on your very own server.