Despite Virtual Private Servers having a ten-year advantage, it’s looking like the web hosting landscape is changing thanks to Cloud Hosting. Recently, cloud hosting has grown in popularity, offering some big advantages over VPS hosting, depending on your needs. So what are the key differences between the two and when should you pick one over the other?
First off, the more established Virtual Private Server packages offer a share of a physical servers resources. There will be many Virtual Private Servers operating on a physical server, all running separately from one another, with no effect. A good thing to check before choosing a Virtual Private Server is what is the maximum number of VPS’ a web host will allow on one server, most good web hosts will have that information readily available on their website. A starter package of VPS will typically get you a small fixed share of a CPU core; 1 GB or 2GB of RAM; limited bandwidth; and a fixed amount of storage on either a hard disk or a solid state disk. At the higher end of the scale you can get VPS’ with 4 and 8 dedicated cores, 16GB RAM, terabytes of disk space and close to unlimited bandwidth. You are able to gain full administrator privileges to the operating system running in the VPS, either through an interface, or on the command line, just like you were running your own server. So all in all VPS can offer a high level of flexibility; you plan your usage, pick your package and off you go. But what happens when you can’t plan your usage and your new online store or website goes viral ?
Enter Cloud Hosting. It’s highly expandable web hosting, offering all the benefits of VPS hosting but the resource limits are built to ebb and flow to meet demand. This means that when the customers are online, your site can cope. And when they’re not, you’re not paying for a service which isn’t being used. The result, thanks to the resources of multiple physical servers, means systems are more reliable and less susceptible to crashing. However, nothing is for free and those extra resources have to be budgeted for.
But this growth in Cloud Hosting, doesn’t necessarily signal the end of VPS’ as this set-up still suits some businesses. For instance, this could be those e who know their server demands and those whose server demands are consistent. And there’s plenty of options available. Take British web hosting company, Memset for example. It’s been in the VPS industry for 12 years. Now, it offers six different packages depending of what customers require, each with varying RAM, CPU and Disk space, thus offering a degree of flexibility for businesses. In addition, thanks to the company’s policy of putting around 15 virtual machines on each server, this offers a higher level of security and better performance because of the relatively small numbers. And if it’s Cloud Hosting you’re after, then Memset can help with that too with both fixed packages and pay as you go. So when it comes to hosting, there’s plenty of choice.