Tips to choose the best VPS for your website
Normally, when we start a small project such as a website or
an online store we opt for the most basic and cheap hosting plan since we
usually start with a tight budget. But what happens when we start to be very
successful? Slow loading, constant drops, your emails always come as SPAM and a
long list of problems that can throw overboard all those months or years of
hard work in your online business.
Calling your hosting provider tells you that your website is
too big to be in your hosting for a lifetime and that you need to go to a VPS.
What is that? Why not before and now? Won't it be a maneuver from my hosting
provider to get me more money?
In this post, we will try to solve these and other questions
about Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
What is a VPS server?
To understand what a VPS is, we can classify accommodation
levels into three basic levels:
-
Shared hosting.
-
Virtual Private Server.
-
Dedicated server.
As we can see, VPS is an intermediate step between shared
cheap hosting and powerful dedicated servers. To understand what a VPS is, just
imagine a dedicated server cut into several parts of different sizes, every one
of them independent of each other.
While in a cheap hosting you share all the resources of the
server with your “neighbors”, in a VPS the resources of the server are for you
alone, that is, you have a server for you, so the actions of the other VPS
hosted in the main server will not affect you at all.
Advantages of VPS
As we have mentioned in the previous point, each VPS is
independent of the other one even if they are on the same server since they are
different installations, this is why we can select the desired operating
system, and something that we cannot do in shared hosting.
Another of the great advantages is that in a VPS server we
will have a unique IP address for us and we will not have to share it with
other people, freeing ourselves from the risk of our IP falling into the dreaded
SPAM blacklists due to the action of other people.
In short, a VPS gives us the peace of mind that we will be
“isolated” from other clients and will not have to suffer the consequences of
misuse of the server by other clients. Also, do not forget that a performance
VPS will always outperform a cheap hosting.
What should we look for when hiring a VPS?
The number of hosting providers offering VPS servers is very
large, so it is worth paying attention to some features that we consider
essential:
SSD hard drives:
Fundamental since these are up to 5 times faster than
traditional disks, so our website will load much faster. The use of SSD discs
stands out above all in online stores with extensive catalogs in which
Specialized VPS:
The chosen VPS must have a configuration adapted to our CMS
or eCommerce makes it 100% compatible. In this way, we will save from those
cumbersome server crashes due to an erroneous configuration of a library
Data Center:
A CPD assures us a low latency and therefore a faster
loading of our website. Besides, an IP address will help us comply with the
Organic Law on Protection of Personal Data.
Technical Support:
Perhaps the most important, our hosting provider must offer
us multiple communication channels (telephone, chat, tickets, etc.) and
response speed as fast as possible.
Managed or unmanaged VPS?
Possibly one of the most critical issues when hiring a VPS
is whether we dare to manage it ourselves or delegate to the hosting provider
the task of managing our Virtual Private Server.
The unmanaged VPS is cheaper but requires quite advanced
knowledge about server administration so if we make a mistake we can have our
website offline for a long period
On the contrary, if we opt for a managed VPS we will obtain
the peace of mind that any incident will be studied and resolved by the
technical service specialized in this type of problems. The price of a managed
VPS will be slightly higher.