For those who are having their businesses highly dependent on websites would know the wide array of web hosting avenues they can venture, with an attractive set of packages weighing the cost and storage resources. Most basic needs are fulfilled by shared hosting solutions, which come at a cheaper price compared to others like Virtual Private Storage (VPS) and dedicated hosting. Having said that, you would also appreciate the fact that someday soon, your business is going to grow big and reach out to many more customers. With great business, comes greater data. And you would need more than a shared hosting to store and manage all of that.

VPS provides the next obvious better solution, if you are looking to upgrade from your traditional widely popular shared hosting. It is like moving from a shared apartment with many other roommates to a more personalized, yet shared space, where you have your own room to maintain, but shared gardens and parking lots!

What are the factors that you look for in a storage solution?

Starting with performance, VPS outperforms shared hosting here, as the resources are dedicated within the shared space, to your application. A single customer cannot eat up a large chunk of the available resource, both in terms of space and time complexity. With enhanced monitoring capabilities, VPS ensures that the hard limits set for all the accounts are complied with, and the chance of an individual account affecting the performance of others is reduced by a huge margin.

The next thing that comes to your mind is security. And rightfully so as the shared hosting platform that you had been using all this time was vulnerable to malicious attacks due to the co-existence of multiple accounts under the same operating system. A malware induced through another application could very well affect yours. This lack of privacy and exposure to attacks is well overcome through VPS. Your application would be given a virtual environment to run, with its own file system. What’s more, your system administrator can very well configure the security settings as per requirement. You can also choose the operating system and other services as per your need, as against shared hosting, where the landlord has all the power!

VPS provides virtualizations like OpenVZ and Xen Linux, while shared hosting virtualizations are usually provider defined. As far as scalability is concerned, VPS provides you with facilities to upgrade or downgrade and to install basic services. You can also configure IP addresses and have the entire super user access to your VPS environment, which gives you the power to customize stuff as per changing business needs. Yes of course, you might need to hire a system administrator for all these!

So, if your business is growing and your feel that you need more control over your applications and data, it is time to shell out some extra money and move on to VPS. Although driven by business needs and budget, investing in a more secure, scalable and resourceful web hosting would yield more in days to come.