A Few Tips on How to Choose a VPS Hosting Company
Friday, February 26th, 2010When it comes to getting finished websites hosted online, there are many options available for the future webmasters. In the early stages, free web hosting is often used to save on expenses, but from there you have a choice of going for the shared hosting where you pay less at the expense of some speed and security or you can go with the dedicated hosting to enjoy massive speed benefits and better server management. If dedicated hosting is too expensive and you are mainly interested with the root access, you will be better off with a VPS hosting company instead as is not as expensive as dedicated hosting. Still,although there are many VPS hosting companies to choose from, not all can provide a good service. Take a good look at these aspects before making your choice.
Memory and Bandwidth
Every VPS package includes a specification that tells you how much RAM is dedicated to your account. Regardless of the type of site you’re planning to manage, try to find a plan that offers at least 512 MB RAM. Anything lower than that will cause a noticeable impact on your site’s performance especially during high traffic periods. There is also a dedicated amount of hard disk space as well and how much you need depends on what site you plan on setting up, but most plans should give you more than 40 GB.
Like in all other hosting plans, bandwidth should be play a major role in your decision. Don’t be fooled by the “unlimited bandwidth” label - the terms of agreemnt may contain hidden catches. Before accepting their bandwitdth offerings, find out what file types are permitted.
Interface and Service Quality
If you’re experienced in the role of a web administrator, choose a VPS hosting that offers a familiar interface. You normally have to choose between cPanel and Plesk. Due to its user-friendliness, Plesk is a better choice for beginners. Since you are running the virtual server yourself, you should do some research on how the company handles their support and see for yourself what support options they have available to webmasters. This way, you know what to do in case your server has some problems or if you need to upgrade.
Security and Uptime
In spite of being run in a virtualized environment, your site is not protected from all the possible attacks. Remember that your site is located in a shared server so downtimes and slowdowns due to harmful attacks like DDoS are possible. These attacks won’t occur though if the VPS hosting promises tight security. Find out from reviews to make sure that their servers are well-protected. Even if they are, see to it that their uptime is guaranteed to be above 99.95%.
Even though you’ll probably find many VPS hosting companies that meet all these conditions, be sure to compare the prices and contracts they offer. VPS accounts will cost aroud $ 40 per month, with no setup fee, although some budget vps companies offer vps hosting for $ 10/month to start with. After doing a final background research on the hosts that you shortlisted, you should end up with an optimal VPS host that you can happily stay in for a long time.
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