Should Your VPS be in the Cloud?

In the world of web hosting, you have three major options. A dedicated server is all yours to do with as you wish, a cloud plan gives

you infinite room to grow, but is expensive, and a virtual private server, or VPS, is a combination of the elasticity of the cloud and relatively low requirements of a dedicated server. Although you’re technically sharing the server, it’s clearly partitioned and you’re guaranteed a portion of the resources all the time, so the other sites don’t have as much of an effect on your site’s resources and speed. Because it has the best of both worlds, many businesses opt to use a VPS for their hosting needs.

Once you have made the decision to go with a VPS, you still have one more major choice ahead of you. Either you can get a traditional VPS, which is located on one physical server, or a cloud VPS, which is on a cloud network and is actually using several physical servers all at the same time. When deciding between the two, consider several key factors and take the ones that are most important to you into account as you make your choice.

Cost: Traditional and cloud VPS hosting plans tend to have comparative costs per unit of resources purchased. However, one key difference is in how the plan calculates your cost each month. With a traditional plan, you purchase a set amount of resources and pay for them every month, regardless of whether or not you use them. On the other hand, with a VPS, you often have the option of paying just for what you use, which can vary from one month to another.

Performance: There are many similarities in performance between a traditional and cloud virtual private server, which both offer scaling resources for your site to help it perform to the level you need. However, one difference is that a cloud VPS can adjust to use more resources because you’re sharing an entire cloud platform rather than a single server, and therefore are more likely to have the resources available during times when your site can use a little extra. Another difference is that cloud VPS hosting is much less likely to have downtime because your site uses many different servers, not just one physical server.

Scalability: One of the major perks of any type of VPS in comparison to a dedicated server is that it’s much easier to upgrade to a larger size if the need arises. You should be able to scale up your traditional VPS to a larger space, provided the server you’re on can handle it. Otherwise you may need to migrate to a different server to accomplish the transition. With a cloud VPS, scaling up is incredibly simple, and it may even be done automatically for you as your traffic dictates.

While traditional and cloud VPS hosting are similar in many ways, the cloud has the edge in most areas. Once you switch to cloud virtual private server hosting, you’ll enjoy the perks of increased reliability and easier scalability. You may even get all of this at a lower cost, depending on how you use your server and which cloud hosting company you choose.