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Things that You Should Know When Buying VPS

June 7, 2010 by vpsplan

Virtual Private Server (VPS) is not a toy like shared hosting. People think that a dedicated server is something too difficult to manage while a shared hosting is just a toy that is very easy to handle. VPS however, is something in the middle. Most of the websites on the web can be well accommodated in a beginner VPS plan if it is well tweaked and optimized. A beginner VPS plan is quite powerful, but it is a little bit more expensive than a shared hosting.
From my few years of experience of using VPS servers, I have put together some tips that might come handy when you are buying your first VPS hosting.
1. Never buy VPS with only a low 192MB RAM. The main system can take up to 150MB of it, and there won’t be enough memory left to be used by your own applications and software like WHM and cPanel. At the very least get 256MB of RAM, however this can still not be enough, so you better calculate exactly how much RAM you will need to ensure better performance.
2. If you are not a security expert or an experienced server administrator, it is better for you to get a managed VPS hosting rather than an unmanaged VPS. If you are not an experienced server administrator but you are using an unmanaged VPS for your sites, there are a lot of tutorials and guides that can help you to improve the security of your server, but it is still better for you to leave it to the experts.
3. VPS is actually cheaper than shared hosting (unit-wise), but the performance of VPS is still far from the performance of dedicated servers. When a physical server is running several VPS on it, and each of them are consuming around 100MB of RAM, plus the parent system itself is using a portion of the memory to operate, there will be less resources available for your sites, compared to dedicated servers.
4. One of the good things about VPS is that it is customizable like dedicated hosting. The VPS is running its own distribution so that you can do anything you want with the root access.