Having an online presence is essential not only for large businesses but for small or local ones as well. Maybe you’re thinking about starting a website for your business and are currently looking for web hosting options.
As a small business owner, your best bet is to choose VPS hosting. Here are the benefits you’ll get by choosing a VPS for your business.
The best value for the money
When choosing web hosts, you may notice that there are three types most commonly used: shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated server. In terms of price, VPS comes in the middle.
It is more expensive than shared hosting, but also less costly than a dedicated server.
You’re also more likely to get your money’s worth because many VPS hosting plans are customizable or have many different options. You’ll only have to pay for what your business needs.
Since they’re customizable, it’s vital to research VPS plans from various providers. Make sure that you choose the right VPS hosting service that matches your needs.
Greater performance and speed
Compared to shared hosting, VPS also has better performance and speed.
With a shared server, you’re sharing resources with other websites, which can impact your website’s performance when the traffic is high for another user.
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. As its name suggests, it’s more similar to a dedicated hosting than shared in terms of speed and performance.
You’re allocated your own virtualized private server, and in turn, will have more resources that are yours to use alone. This improves the speed and performance of your website.
Having your own server is especially important for running a business. Research shows that a consistently slow website will frustrate a customer more than a temporarily down website.
Reliability
As VPS is priced higher than shared hosting, it can often have better uptime guarantees. Website uptime is the amount of time the server is running. On average, websites are offline 3 hours per month due to downtime.
If unscheduled maintenance takes place and your website is down, you’re more likely to get better compensation if you use VPS hosting than if you choose shared.
VPS hosting also uses RAID SSDs – a data storage configuration that combines multiple hard drives. With this configuration, your website will likely have better speed and performance. It’s also easier to restore data in case something goes wrong in one of the hard drives.
Security, backups, and malware protection
You’re guaranteed to have more resources with VPS hosting than with shared, and that means you’re in control of securing your website.
With a virtual private server, you’ll have multiple options to secure your server. There are features integrated with your control panel and software you can install to protect your site from potential attacks.
Privacy and access control
VPS also allows you to have more control over privacy and access to the server. A VPS grants you your own partitioned server space.
As you have your own space, you’ll be able to install software or perform system restarts without affecting others who share the same VPS server.
With a business, there is likely more than one person managing the website. Various file systems are available for your VPS hosting to limit each user’s privileges and access rights, like CageFS.
Scalability as the business grows
You’re keen on growing your business; it won’t stay small forever.
As your business expands, you’ll get more customers visiting your website, which means more traffic.
Most VPS plans are customizable or have plenty of options to fit your needs just right, which means that you can buy more resources from the provider when your website gains more visitors.
More control
VPS hosting gives you complete control over your server operating system. It gives you root access to the server, which means you can install your preferred distribution of a Windows or Linux-based OS, depending on the type of VPS hosting. This makes it easier to optimize your website’s performance and enhance its security.
More control also means easier ways to customize the server to fit your business needs. Users will be able to install their preferred web server stack, employ whatever security systems they need, while having much more flexible configuration options.
Support
Complete control and customizability is an excellent perk of VPS hosting if you have the technical skills to manage a server. However, monitoring your server is going to be a hassle if you don’t have a technical background.
If that’s the case, some web hosting providers offer managed or semi-managed VPS as well. IT professionals from the provider will handle the management of your server.
They can also handle any security issues your server might experience, from installing patches to monitoring in case of a possible failure or breach. Lastly, they’ll make sure your server’s OS is updated to the newest version to keep it running smoothly.
It would be best to keep in mind that a VPS with full support will cost you more than an unmanaged VPS hosting. For many, the cost is worth the security that comes with a managed server.
