Shared Hosting is the go-to website hosting for many beginners and business owners when they first take their business online to cater to the needs of fewer customers. However, as the business grows and the website gains more traffic, it requires more resources and capacity to manage the growing server requests efficiently.
This is where VPS Server Hosting comes into play. Unlike Shared Hosting, it’s one of the most flexible and scalable hosting services that offer high customization abilities. Using a VPS Server, you can handle a huge volume of traffic effectively—without hammering your website speed and performance.
This is why many high-traffic and dynamic websites use VPS Hosting. In this article, we’ll delve more into the benefits of a VPS Server for high-traffic websites. But first, let’s have a quick recap of VPS Hosting.
What is VPS Hosting?
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, and VPS Hosting is a type of website hosting where multiple websites share the resources of a single server, but with dedicated resources and isolation. Each website on a VPS server is isolated from the other websites and has dedicated resources that aren’t shared with other websites either. And, this is made possible through a process called server virtualisation and software called a hypervisor.
For example, if you buy a VPS plan with 6GB RAM, 300GB storage, and 4 CPU cores, these resources are exclusively dedicated to your website and cannot be accessed by any other website on the server.
Benefits of VPS Hosting for a Dynamic, High-traffic Website
Here’s how VPS Hosting benefits high-traffic websites.
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Reliability
One of the most important factors that contribute to making a website successful is its reliability. Websites that often crash and for prolonged durations pose a two-fold problem. For starters, you’re losing customers if they see an error message when they access your website. Additionally, Google actively pushes down websites that have low uptime, meaning poor reliability hurts your SEO too.
One great advantage of VPS is that all websites are isolated from one another, meaning that the actions of one website will have absolutely no impact on other websites on the server. This eliminates the notorious ‘Bad Neighbour’ problem entirely.
Of course, hardware failures on the server can bring your website down, but with good hosting companies, you’ll find that those things are rare. So, a VPS Hosting plan from a decent hosting company significantly reduces the chances of a website crash, increasing your uptime.
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Performance
Average load time for websites has been steadily falling. A load time of two seconds is just about average these days. Of course, loading speed impacts SEO, too, and there are countless studies about how people simply refuse to use slow websites, meaning website speed is crucial.
With VPS Hosting, getting great performance is only a question of choosing the right plan. Given that it’s easy to scale those resources (it should take minutes), it’s not difficult to get the exact quantity of resources you need.
VPS also offers predictable performance. Once you buy them, the resources aren’t shared with other websites. This means that these resources are at your website’s disposal 24/7, ready to be deployed whenever the need arises.
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Price
Shared Hosting is cheaper than VPS Hosting. However, it does not offer website isolation or dedicated resources. Additionally, Shared Hosting is usually best suited to simple websites with little traffic.
Dedicated Hosting offers a lot in terms of performance. As a result, the biggest websites in the world prefer a Dedicated Server. However, it’s quite expensive, and most websites simply cannot afford to run on such a dedicated setup.
VPS strikes the perfect balance between performance, features, and price. It offers Dedicated Hosting-like performance but at a fraction of the price. Furthermore, it offers everything that Dedicated Hosting offers — performance, security, control, and isolation — on a smaller scale, making it a really popular choice for high-traffic websites that aren’t there at the tippy top just yet.
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The root access in VPS
The word ‘root’ simply refers to a username that’s common to almost all Linux systems, including servers. The root user is assumed to be the system admin of a given computer and therefore has complete access to all its files, folders, and settings.
A root user can install programs, delete them, make modifications to the security configurations, manage all the ports, and do so much more. ‘Root access’ simply means that you get the username and the password.
Generally, root access isn’t provided in Shared Hosting environments because multiple websites share the same platform, and changes made in the root can have ramifications for everyone.
However, in VPS Hosting, all websites are isolated. Each website gets its resources, too, meaning that each website essentially works like an independent server. That’s where the name ‘Virtual Private Server’ comes from. Given that each website is isolated, companies can offer root access with VPS Hosting.
Importance of VPS for High Traffic Websites
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Third-party security applications
As the traffic of your website increases, so do the threats. Cyber attacks can very realistically cripple websites for a long time. One solution would be installing third-party security software that can better protect your website.
Without root access, you’d have to contact your hosting provider, wait for their approval and then install these applications. However, you can install security applications (or any other applications) without anyone’s permission.
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Better port management
One reason for the ever-increasing rise in cyber attacks is that bots are now carrying out many attacks. Bots have become pretty good at hacking websites, and one of the reasons for their efficiency is that a lot of website owners never bother changing the default configurations of their websites.
Ports are one way through which bots gain entry into your network. With root access in VPS, you can close all open, but unused ports. Additionally, you can also change the default port numbers for an added layer of security.
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JavaScript delivery optimisation
Whenever a browser accesses your website, your server sends information to that browser. One of the things that’s sent over is a file called JavaScript file. The browser reads this file, and only after that does it load the website, which increases the time it takes for your website to load.
With root access in VPS, you can change the settings so that a browser loads the website first and then reads the JavaScript file in the background, making your website slightly faster. While this may seem too marginal, there are two things to note:
One, for a high-traffic website that’s competing with similar websites, every small gain matters. Second, this is just one of the many performance-related optimisations that you can do in VPS with root access.
Conclusion
VPS Hosting is a powerful hosting solution that offers the much-needed control, flexibility, and scalability to suit the needs of dynamic and high-traffic websites.
Besides these features, it also guarantees maximum uptime, fast speed, and seamless performance irrespective of huge traffic spikes.
However, the quality of services you get only depends on the web hosting company. At HostGator, we offer performance-driven VPS Server Hosting solutions at an affordable rate with full root access, near-instant provisioning, and more. So, get in touch with us if you wish to host your high-traffic website on our VPS Server to scale your business and serve maximum customers.