VPS Hosting has grown to be the hosting platform of choice, especially for growing and high-traffic websites. The primary factors that made this possible were account isolation, control, scalability and customizability offered by the VPS Hosting architecture.
In this article, we will understand the VPS Hosting setup and look at how it guarantees a scalable and customizable hosting platform.
What is VPS Hosting?
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and VPS is a method of hosting where multiple websites use the resources of a single server, but cannot use the resources that are allocated to other websites in the server.
For example, if you opt for a VPS plan with 2GB RAM, 50GB storage, and 2 CPU cores, those resources are allocated to you and you alone. Even though there are other websites on the server, they cannot use the resources that have been set aside for your website.
This isolation of resources is made possible by the architecture that VPS Hosting is built on. A server that’s serving VPS websites uses a hypervisor to create this isolation and virtualisation.
A hypervisor is a software or hardware that sits on the server and has the capability to create virtual machines (VMs) and allocate specific resources to those machines.
For example, let’s say you want a VPS plan with resources mentioned above (2GB RAM, 50GB storage, and 2 CPU cores), the hypervisor will identify these resources in the server and set them aside for your website. Once they’re allocated (this usually happens in real-time), other websites don’t have any access to these specific resources.
Similarly, each website on a VPS Server will have specific resources allocated to them. From the server’s point of view, each website is simply a VM that has access to specific resources. However, each VM (each website, in our case) is independent of the other. The actions of one VM will not have any impact on other VMs.
This VPS architecture offers quite a few advantages. For starters, you get predictable performance. But more importantly, the hypervisor isolates each VM and this means that your part of the server will act like a small, independent server. Over this server, you will have complete control, meaning you can change and modify everything exactly the way you want it.
How does VPS guarantee scalability?
Scaling a VPS is usually done through vertical scaling. Vertical scaling refers to the process of adding resources to an existing server. These resources may be raw storage, RAM, or CPU cores.
In a VPS environment, scaling up is an easy task that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. You just have to open your cPanel dashboard and add whatever resources that you need. With good hosting companies, these resources will be provisioned to you almost instantly.
This is, again, enabled by the hypervisor. So, when you put in a request for, say additional 4 GB RAM, the hypervisor intercepts that request. It then checks if the server has spare RAM available. If there is, 4 GB will be allocated to your website.
This is where the choice of your web hosting company will matter. Good companies will usually not populate their servers entirely. Instead, they’ll leave some headroom for the websites to grow. If resources aren’t available on the server, they will have to be added to the server first and then allocated for your website.
What customiszation does a VPS Hosting plan offer?
Most of the customiszation options in a VPS plan comes from root access. ‘Root’ is a user of a Linux machine who has complete access to the system. There are no restrictions when you have root access.
Root access is a possibility in VPS Hosting because each website is independent of other websites in the server. Therefore, any changes that you make are limited only to your website. This means that you get complete control over the workings of your website while not affecting anyone else on the server.
Root access essentially allows you to customisze anything that you want about your VPS. For starters, you can install server-wide applications. In most shared hosting setups, when you want to install an application that isn’t natively supported by your hosting company, you have to get their permission. With VPS, that isn’t the case. You can install any application that you choose.
Second, you can do a lot of port management to secure your website. Open ports that aren’t being used are a serious security threat. With root access, you can close all open ports that aren’t being used. In fact, it takes just a few minutes to do it. Additionally, you can also change the default port numbers to better shield yourself from cyberattacks launched by bots.
Root access also allows you to customize access to users. Obviously, you don’t want everyone to have root access. You can quite realistically delete or modify system-critical files leading to data loss or worse still, complete website crash. So, to mitigate this problem, and to customize user access, root users can create an access hierarchy of sorts. You can allocate which user has access to what features, thereby strengthening your data security.
VPS with root access basically allows you to customize everything on your server. You can even install third-party security software or applications. Additionally, you can also customize security configurations, make performance related modifications (e.g., disable hotlinking), and essentially customize your server and website functioning to your exact liking.
This is what makes VPS quite popular with business websites. It allows your system admins to implement your vision of your company website. Even if you don’t have an in-house IT team, you can gradually work your way up to using root access in VPS. If you don’t want to use root access for the moment, that’s fine too, given that VPS plans come with easy-to-use dashboards like cPanel that work just like any other software.
Conclusion
The most important advantage that VPS offers is that anyone can use it. If you don’t really know a whole lot about hosting, you can use it easily. On the other hand, system admins can use it too, given that it offers so much control. This combination of scalability, customization, stability, and performance makes VPS a popular choice for business websites.
VPS Hosting is not a niche hosting solution that’s a new experiment for hosting providers. HostGator India offers VPS Hosting plans with Solid State Drive, full root access, comprehensive DDoS protection and 24×7 customer support. What’s more, the number of people using VPS is going up steadily. So, if you’re looking to create a website for your business and set foot into the digital marketplace, VPS Hosting from HostGator India might be exactly what you want.
