7 Essential Factors to Look for When Buying Your VPS Server
Have you finally decided to run your website on a VPS Server? Trust me, this is a much-needed and sensible decision!
VPS, or Virtual Private Servers, are excellent for allowing you to have more control over your hosting experience. While with a shared server, you have to run your website with hundreds of users using the same server at the same time, this is not the case with VPS since you get to have your CPU resources, RAM, and operating systems.
However, with hundreds of VPS server options available, selecting the best one that meets all your needs is quite a task. This requires you to do proper research and comparison among various platforms so that you don’t get to face VPS issues in the future, like website downtime or lack of performance.
To ease that out for you, we have covered seven essential factors to consider when buying your VPS server so that you make the best choice out of multiple options.
7 Essential Factors to Look for When Buying Your VPS Server
Here are the seven major factors that you need to look for before making your final decision about which VPS server to choose.
Performance and Reliability
The first and foremost thing to look for in a VPS server is the performance and reliability that it has to offer.
The VPS server offering excellent performance is highly important for your website to run smoothly. The server should ensure to provide high performance since it will also affect your website’s performance; therefore, choosing a VPS with good performance is essential for your website to run quickly.
VPS hosting performance can be influenced by several factors, which are categorized into user-specific, hardware, and software factors.
- User-specific factors: Some user-specific factors that affect the performance of a VPS server include the complexity of workload and traffic, poorly configured software or application, availability of resources to accommodate temporary spikes in traffic, etc.
- Hardware factors: The processing power of the CPU, sufficient available RAM, speed and bandwidth of network connection, and type of storage (SDD or HDD) are all hardware specifications that affect VPS’ performance.
- Software factors: The virtualization technology of a VPS server, the choice of OS and its configuration, and the choice of web server software can highly influence how the VPS server performs.
Regarding reliability, the VPS server’s hardware should be reliable enough to provide you with guaranteed resources and attractive attributes. It should provide you with a sense of independence and stable service.
Server Uptime
Another important factor to look at when buying a VPS server is the server’s uptime. Uptime means how often the server is available, and high uptime means your website will be available to potential customers almost all the time.
Choosing a server that is usually facing downtime issues is not a wise decision since it can severely and adversely affect the customer traffic on your website. The higher the uptime the server offers, the better and more reliable your website will perform.
The hosting service should provide uptime ratings of at least 99.95% or more to ensure you get the best desired results.
Easy Scalability
Easy scalability means your hosting provider allows you to increase or decrease the server resources according to your website’s demands without any difficulty. This is one of the most important factors to consider when buying your VPS server since you don’t want to face difficulty scaling your resources.
The hosting provider must give you access to system resources per your needs and demands. When you select an easily scalable VPS server, you can add storage, bandwidth, and other important resources whenever you want to or even decrease them as per your requirements.
Customer Support
Since you want your website to run all the time and not face any downtime, ensure that the VPS server you are going to select is responsive. This is only possible if the hosting provider guarantees excellent customer support.
If your website faces problems any time of the day or even when hackers are targeting it, the VPS server must have an expert team available to guide you on what to do.
Not only should customer support be available 24/7, but the team should also be expert enough to protect your website against any malfunction or targets of hackers and avoid any downtime to occur.
Essential VPS Features
This is where you get to decide if a VPS server is serious about providing you with the best. At the end of the day, most VPS servers provide similar features and products; however, if any of them comes with some cost-effective and special features that will improve your website’s performance, you need to go for it!
Here are some of the features that play a vital role in bettering the VPS server’s performance:
- IPv6: This is the latest version of the internet protocol and offers data integrity, authentication, and built-in security. Nowadays, almost all web hosting providers offer IPv6 with VPS hosting to ensure robust connectivity and data latency.
- IPv4: It is an IP address consisting of a host and network address.
- Admin Access: Admin access is important to ensure you are taken care of when you need major changes or guidance using VPS.
- Root Access lets you do whatever you want on your server without worrying about limited permissions or access.
- OS Options: OS influences many things, like what applications you can use and how you configure your environment. Ensure you have multiple OS options available on the server you buy so that you can go with the one that suits your needs the best.
- Customizability: Permission to customize your server resources is essential so that all your specific needs and demands are met.
Server Management Tools
Server Management Tools are required so that many things are managed and monitored throughout, including traffic, bandwidth, resource usage, and other relevant activities.
Whether you have decided to go with unmanaged VPS to save the cost or invest in managed VPS, both of them require some management tools for running your website smoothly and providing excellent hosting services.
Some of the free server management tools available these days include:
- Webmin: It is an open-source management tool that utilizes modules to manage servers.
- ISPConfig: free web hosting control panel supporting multiple languages, various operating systems, and server management functions.
- aaPanel: open-source management tool that comes with many security features to protect your website.
- CyberPanel: comes with a standard Firewall ID that is activated by default for providing security.
The best-paid server management tools include:
- Plesk: allows you to control and manage multiple virtual hosts on a single server.
- cPanel: comes with an easy-to-understand interface to configure various VPS features.
- Webuzo: a secure and safe VPS management tool that has support for many server-based tools, including MySQL, Apache, etc.
- DirectAdmin: It is a GUI server management tool designed specially to make VPS management quicker and easier.
Security Features
The VPS you select must always be ready to defend against threats like hacker attacks or malware. While VPS hosting is usually more secure and isolated in a hosting environment compared to shared hosting, there are still some major differences between the hosting providers.
One of the most prominent differences is the type of VPS hosting being provided. When it comes to Cloud-based VPS solutions, they offer a better security guarantee compared to others.
Additionally, if you are going for managed VPS hosting, you will get to enjoy standard VPS components like preinstalled and updated security patches, firewall, etc. But with unmanaged VPS hosting, you will have to look out for security yourself and do the malware scans or security updates on your own.
Conclusion
If you have been using shared hosting previously, moving to VPS hosting is the best decision that you will make. It is affordable and provides better resources focused only on you so that your website runs smoothly and more efficiently.
As a website owner, you must choose a hosting partner that strongly meets all your hosting needs. However, with hundreds of VPS hosting providers available out there, choosing the best one can get overwhelming, and with the wrong decision, your website can face severe adverse effects.
Therefore, in this article, we have mentioned the seven essential factors to look for when buying your VPS server to make it easier for you to choose which one to go with.
