What are virtual private servers?

Article Author: Guest Contributor

Virtual private servers also known as VPS, can be considered the middle man of web hosting. It is basically for the clients who need something in between the shared web hosting and the dedicated web hosting. With the variety of customer's needs it is essential for web hosting companies to come up with a solution for their clients to fit their needs and continue to keep the cost low. Reducing overhead for the web hosting companies is important because they can reduce the same costs of their services. This is why the virtual private servers continue to rise in popularity to meet the needs of clients.

Why Not Shared?

With a shared web hosting service, businesses are grouped together on servers. This is often not an issue as most companies operate who choose to do so are small and do not need much attention. Sharing an IP address can do harm to a company should one of the other companies do something illegal. When this happens, the IP gets blocked from different sites and downtime occurs for all the other customers until the problem is solved. This can be devastating for a company and many do not want to deal with this. Besides security, a business may choose the virtual private server because they can utilize any software on that operating system. The flexibility is a great pro for a business.

Why Not Dedicated?

Dedicated web hosting gets scrutinized often for the cost it incurs to have total control and security for your own server. Not all businesses need quite this amount of usage either until later when their company experiences growth. By using a virtual private server the web hosting company can make things more efficient with the usage of space. The idle time the system has is not good for the web hosting company. This allows them to come up with a way that they can ensure there is no idle time where a server is not being used but each business has their own control capabilities.

More and more web hosting companies are offering virtual private servers to their clients as it seems to fit a lot of business needs. The cost is beneficial to the customer if they choose not to go with the dedicated system, yet it provides more security than a shared server. This is definitely a route more businesses may look into as their business continues to grow.