VPS - Virtual Private Servers

What is a VPS?

VPS stand for Vitual Private Server. Gives you all the benefits of a dedicated web server for the price of shared hosting.

How much does a VPS Cost?

The price of a VPS is dropping all the time. At the time of writing it is possible to pick up VPS hosting for as little as $29 a month. Packages scale up as they do with regular shared hosting - the amount of disk space increases, bandwidth, memory available - but also the performance of the server your hosted on.

How does a VPS Work?

Basically you take a high performance server and partition it so that to the end user, they appear to have their very own server. The number of partitions is crucial for the level of performance. It's important to know up front how many customers will be sharing your server as you'll all be competing for a share of the machine's resources.

Typical Uses of a VPS

• Any type of website!
• Lightweight gaming servers with high speed network connections
• Team Speak and other Voice Application Servers
• Remote network monitoring
• MySQL Server
• CVS/Subversion Platforms
• Primary or Secondary Name Servers
• Primary or Secondary Mail Exchangers
• E-Commerce Websites that require security / SSL
• WebMail Server

Windows or Linux VPS

You'll find that most VPS packages will either lean towards a typical LAMP (LINUX, Apache, mySql & PHP) configuration or a MS solution featuring asp, .net MSSQL etc.. Go for the one which utilizes the technology you currently work with. Remember you'll have root access to the machine so also make sure you understand the rspective operating system. Linux VPS tend to be a liitle cheaper as the licensing cost of server software are obviously cheaper and that gets reflected in the end user price.