Imagine a scenario where your business begins to be successful and the current web hosting for your website requires consuming much more resources to be able to serve pages with the same versatility as before. Of course you are happy because sales have increased thanks to the authoritative presence of the online business, but the site has become slow and suffers constant crashes that make you lose money and potential customers.
Maybe it’s time to take the bull by the horns and think about migrating to a dedicated server or a VPS, where you will enjoy the advantage of having much larger RAM, processing and bandwidth resources, although you should analyze it well with your technical team and accounting department, since Paid Hosting with these characteristics will be much more expensive than your current shared hosting, and you must also evaluate whether the investment suits you in the medium and long term.
In this article we are going to make a brief comparison between VPS and Dedicated Server that you should take into account if you are thinking about migrating your corporate websites.
Difference between VPS and dedicated server.
What is a VPS?
A VPS Server provides a personalized control panel, an IP address (or more than one depending on your hosting provider and the plans it handles), ample bandwidth and an acceptable RAM quota that will improve the performance of the high-speed website. benefits.
A VPS also provides root account access that allows you to install or remove any software, reboot the server and modify permission settings, and create any number of sub-accounts so that different users can manage resources.
Sometimes, depending on the Hosting Providers, there could be some restrictions on certain resources, since otherwise it would disturb the workflow of other neighboring clients (websites) (A Physical server can contain several VPS, although in a smaller number if compared to Shared Hosting which can have thousands of clients).
To mention an example, on some VPSs it is not possible to install C/C++ compilers and other software packages for security and stability reasons more than anything.
What is a Dedicated Server?
A Dedicated Server is the most expensive option on the market. If you hire a Dedicated Server, all its resources will be used exclusively by your company, since it is practically a physical server in your provider’s data center. Dedicated Servers provide greater control over the entire server, from choosing the operating system, adding security layers, installing custom software, etc. Simply put, the restrictions on what you can or cannot do are almost zero. You can even contract multiple IP addresses, hard drives, RAM, etc. according to your needs. In short: a Dedicated Server scales perfectly and accompanies you in the successes of your business.
As we already mentioned, all resources such as RAM, hard drive, network connection, processors are 100% dedicated to a single client, unlike a VPS server where they give you only a part of the resources of the physical machine, since that there are other clients with their own displayed server.
Technical aspects. Difference between VPS and dedicated server
As we briefly discussed a few paragraphs above: A virtual private server (VPS) is hosted on a partition of a physical server using special software that allows virtualization. What this practically means is two things: First, it means that the “server” is still technically hosted on the same physical equipment where other VPSs are hosted. Therefore, bandwidth will not be as high as it would be with a dedicated server, and neither will total available disk space or RAM usage.
This implies that the physical server that hosts several VPS must be a very powerful server implementing two or several processors, a large amount of RAM and storage disks that are measured in terabytes. Still, you will be able to run your own operating system. As a result, you will be able to configure the server in such a way that it specifically suits the applications and operations that your business requires and the files that are needed for clients, all of these resources simply cannot be found on shared hosting.
In addition to the higher cost of maintaining a dedicated server, it will give you more control than a virtual private server. For example, if you ever need your dedicated server to be restarted for any reason you can do it without a problem without having to physically be in the server console. This can also be done on a VPS, but since you don’t have control over the physical server, any serious problems on a real server must be fixed by the hosting provider.
Which of the two types of hosting should you choose?
After reading this brief Comparison between VPS and Dedicated Server, you just need to know which one you should choose. As a general rule, if you require total control, have the knowledge or know someone who is a good systems administrator, and above all you require a lot of power and have enough resources, opt for a Dedicated Server. On the other hand, if even having all of the above, you still do not require that much power, you can start with a VPS, since if you do not use even the 20% performance that a Virtual Server provides, you will practically be giving away your money. A VPS can be the perfect option for medium-growth businesses.