Choosing a VPS Hosting Provider

If your website is experiencing immense growth, it was be better to hos the site on a VPS. A shared hosting environment tends to be unstable and your growing site may be taking up too much resources. Having a VPS ensures that you are allocated a fixed amount of resources. You don’t have to worry about resource hogging. In addition, you can also make custom tweaks to your site that require admin rights. You can’t do that in a shared hosting environment.

Uptime Guarantee

One of the most important factors of choosing a VPS Hosting Plan is the uptime guarantee. You need maximum uptime and very little or no downtime. Pretty much all companies should offer an uptime guarantee. You should not settle for anything less than 99.95% uptime guarantee. Most providers will offer 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Customer Reviews

Google is your friend. Using the company’s name, perform a search on Google for honest reviews. Reviews should typically be less than a year old. If you can’t find reviews, try asking question on the web hosting companies forums or on a popular web hosting forum. Be warned that the web hosting company may delete negative posts and ban the user.

The Price

There are three types of VPS Web hosting: unmanaged hosting, managed hosting and unmetered hosting. Metered and Unmetered are the most affordable. Managed VPS is more expensive, though you will be given 24-hour server monitoring through an experienced system administrator. Compared to a dedicated server, VPS hosting is very affordable. Typically prices start from €25 per month onwards. While a dedicated server hosting usually starts around €70 per month and up (costs increase quickly to many hundreds).

Technical / Customer Support

Excellent support is an important thing. Being able to talk to someone who can get your site up and running again at any hour is an absolute boon. Before going with a host look into their reputation for customer support. See what kinds of different ways you can contact them when you need support – email, phone, chat, and so on.

Tip: Test support before joining by calling in. You’ll be surprised how many hosts with a toll free number never answer their phones, or have long hold times. Make sure you call the technical or support department. It’s not unusual for a web host to have incredible response times for their sales department but lousy response times for their technical or support department.

Hardware

What kind of machines does your hosting company use? Tips: Don’t buy anything less than 256MB as that may impair performance. The more RAM you have for your account, the faster your site will load.

Managed or Unmanaged Server

With unmanaged server, setup of the system is on your own. Your hosting company’s support will help you resolve some smaller issues, but don’t expect much. With managed server, you can say to your hosting company – please setup application you need to the VPS and they will do it. You can ask them to do maintenance, to do backups etc.
Unmanaged hosting tends to much less expensive than managed hosting and is more comparable to unmetered costing. If you are going to use unmanaged hosting then see what type of control you have when dealing with the server hardware. You want to be able to perform a reboot when you need it and not when the owner can get around to it.

Features

PHP, MySQL databases, the number of free domains included, e-commerce and more are some of the features that you need to compare when looking for a small business web hosting package to take advantage of.
Fortunately, bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper. Most hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth. Be sure to check with the hosting provider to see what “unlimited” really means. The terms may restrict you to hosting static files and images. If you are going to store other types of files like audio or video files, check with the hosting provider to see if it’s allowed.

Conclusion

I would personally recommend Hosting Ireland’s VPS Hosting as they are competitively priced and they also provide unparalleled customer service.

Introduction to Virtual Private Servers

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a single virtual server/computer that is hosted on a physical server (generally known as a VPS Node). These VPS Nodes generally have large amounts of RAM and Space so that they can be divided up into multiple VPS.

Each VPS is allocated its own amount of RAM and Hard-drive space (and sometimes even CPU). Each VPS shares the VPS Node’s resources, but each VPS has its own allotment and operates independently like a normal server or computer would. Due to the way VPS’ operate, you can install your own software and OS without ever affecting the VPS Node or any other VPS’ on that Node.

In VPS hosting terms, the customer shares the, hardware, network and power with every other customer on that VPS Node. However, the benefits of a VPS over shared hosting are great! For example the have the following benefits:

• Have access to their own OS and File System
• Are always guaranteed their allocated RAM and Space
• Complete Administrative Tasks – changing server configurations, installing personal software.
• Rebooting and powering down their VPS 24/7

These benefits allow customers to have greater freedom and security. VPS are above shared hosting, but below dedicated hosting.

For those customers who are currently on a shared host, and are wanting to move over to a dedicated hosting environment without a great jump in overall costs should probably take use of VPS Hosting. When you use VPS, there is no need to be worried that anyone else can access your data as each VPS has its own operating and file system which is separated from every other customer on the VPS Node. VPS can be suitable for those who wish to host multiple small sites, or wish to host one single site which uses too many resources for shared hosting, or for those who wish to expand their skills from just shared hosting, up to server management without having large costs for a dedicated server.