When to use a VPS?

What is a VPS?

The Virtual Private Server (VPS) - or Server Dédié Virtuel in French - is a trendy website hosting solution. It combines certain advantages of the dedicated server with the more advantageous pricing of the shared server.

More specifically, it is an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) made available by web hosts to meet the demand of many professional and semi-professional customers. They need a secure hosting solution that offers the ability to manage all the technical aspects of the site, in particular its operating system. This is not possible on a shared server which pools machine resources with all users.

On the other hand, customers interested in VPS do not operate a website whose size (data storage and transfer volume) justifies the use of a physical dedicated server, which is more expensive and consumes energy.

Which customer profiles is the VPS solution aimed at?

The use of a VPS is only justified if the customer has the need and the capacity to manage all the technical aspects of his website. These are customers who need a personalized solution to develop their Web project according to their specific desires and constraints. The objective is to find a stable and secure solution to carry out all the maneuvers without accident and to accommodate a number of visits greater than the limits offered by the hosting plans on shared server.

Most hosting providers offer VPS hosting plans with specific technical characteristics (processor, RAM, bandwidth, storage volume), in order to meet most demands.

A VPS can also be used by customers wishing to host multiple sites on a single server. Hosts generally offer this solution. The installation of new sites in the root folder of the server can be done manually or automatically if the host offers this possibility.

Different sites occupy the same web space, but visitors won't notice. This solution is mainly economical because it allows you to take advantage of a single hosting plan for several sites / activities.

Why not web hosting?

The simplest solution available to web developers is web hosting. The site is hosted on a shared server, all of whose resources are shared between the different users. Therefore, the operating system must be the same for all sites and developers have very little leeway . In addition, this solution does not allow large volumes of traffic (visitors).

The dedicated server for 100% personalized hosting

The typical solution most used for large sites with high traffic is that of the dedicated server. Hosting the site (or multiple sites owned by the same owner and sharing a root folder) occupies a physical server. All the resources of this server are dedicated to the operation of the website in question. This expensive solution is only intended for site owners with fairly specific needs and who are able to calculate their needs with a certain degree of precision. If the server is only 50% operated, it is a waste of money because half of the server's resources remain unused. And if the site has to grow, it risks exceeding the capacity of the server, for example by 110%. In this case, a whole additional server would have to be used for just 10% of the website.

Unlike the dedicated server, the VPS precisely allows more flexibility to website developers. They can only use the resources necessary to operate their site. If the rest of the machine's resources are unused, it is the host's problem and not that of the site owner.

Cloud server as an alternative to VPS?

The Cloud is a network pooling the resources of several machines. If a website is hosted in the cloud, its data can be transferred between multiple servers in order to end up in a server with available bandwidth and RAM.

The main advantages of cloud hosting are speed of reaction and elasticity. In the Cloud, as all resources are virtually shared, only the resources strictly necessary for the website are used. As a result, the site owner only pays for what he uses. However, powerful cloud solutions are often more expensive than VPS hosting.

The main advantage of cloud hosting is the technical performance of the site. As the network transfers the site to the most available machines, its accessibility is guaranteed at all times. This is particularly effective for a site characterized by peaks of use. This is the case for news sites, businesses with events (flash promotions), online games, social networks ...

The particular case of VPS Minecraft

In the world of online gaming, Minecraft has established itself as an essential reference. One of the great advantages of this online world-building game is that it allows groups of players to build their own world, separately from everyone else. To do this, they need a stable and efficient web hosting solution, without exploding their budget.

For this reason, VPS has become the most popular solution with Minecraft gaming communities, so much so that some hosts offer Minecraft VPS servers.

Minecraft VPS are specifically designed to guarantee quality graphics performance and to allow communities to develop (adding new players).

Choosing Plesk hosting

Basically, Plesk is a website hosting control panel, competing with the very popular cPanel . Plesk offers more possibilities for Windows users as well as a site builder.

In addition to this, there are Plesk hosting solutions using multiple servers to ensure the stability of the website. These solutions offer the advantages of the Plesk control panel , such as its ability to manage multiple programming codes (Python, PHP, Perl, etc.) and the freedom to administer SSH access.

Which hosting solution to choose in the end?

Unfortunately, there are so many constantly evolving solutions that this question will never find a precise answer. This requires correctly identifying the needs of the developing website (s) and comparing the different offers. There are always areas of intersection where several different offers have similar advantages. The limits are blurred, leaving a good margin of maneuver to those concerned.





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