Undoubtedly, one of the latest fads in the web hosting industry is the Virtual Private Server (VPS for short – also sometimes referred to as VDS or Virtual Dedicated Server). In short, a VPS is a way of splitting a server into multiple partitions using virtualization software. These different partitions can run their own operating system, be rebooted individually, and be completely controlled independent of the other partitions. We utilize this technology to sell these different partitions to users, allowing them to have their own “virtual private server”.

The question now arises “is a VPS right for me?”. Many people incorrectly jump on the VPS bandwagon because of the increased power and control over their service that it grants them but do not really understand what risks they are potentially facing. The two biggest issues to consider when deciding whether to choose to upgrade to a VPS are management and price.

1) Management- With both shared and reseller hosting packages, your hosting provider does a lot for you behind the scenes to ensure that your hosting is stable and secure. The provider frequently hardens, secures, and optimizes the server to prevent any problems. In a VPS enviornment, this technical burden is on you. If you do not posess the technical knowledge to efficiently maintain your VPS (meaning you cannot troubleshoot technical issues yourself, nor can you perform any of the actions previously mentioned effectively), you lose out on the reliability of the service. Sure, there are ways to overcome this problem such as to pay a premium price for a managed VPS plan (one that your hosting provider will manage for you) or you can hire a server management company to help you out. In any case, you are adding more to the cost.

2) Price- Price is the second major factor in choosing whether to upgrade to a VPS or not. While some people get excited to see super-low price VPS plans, there are many results of this “budget” service. Firstly, the VPS will use budget virtualization software. A quick google search will show you many horror stories that result from this – mainly the low-end software being exploited through a vulnerability and then the server getting hacked. In this case, all of your content is often lost. Also, these low end VPS plans do not come with the same software and features that you and your clients would expect (ie. cPanel and Fantastico). You will need to pay extra for these licenses and install them yourself. At the opposite end of the spectra, you can get a high end VPS using the latest and best virtualization technology with the best value-added features but pay significantly more than you would for the same features on a reseller plan. The only real “extra” thing you are getting for the significantly higher price is root access to the server and the ability to host reseller accounts (though some hosts, ourselves included, now have the ability to give reseller customers access to create and host their own reseller accounts).

Now that the two main factors in deciding whether to upgrade to a VPS plan have been addressed, it is time to decide if a VPS plan is right for you. For clients that ask us if we think it is worth it for them to upgrade, we ask them the following two questions:

1) Do you need root access, or do you just want it?
2) Do you think it is worth it to pay more for slightly less features?*

*There are slighly less features on a VPS than a reseller if you use a reseller hosting provider that offers value added services. At XeHost, we offer many different value added services on reseller plans such as a Free WHMCS, End-User Support, a Free Enom Domain Reseller Account, a Free Hosting Template, and much more!

If the client cannot answer yes to both of these questions confidently, then we advise them that a reseller plan may be best for them. While it may be attractive to be on a more expensive hosting platform, they are geting more “bang-for-their-buck” as is. For clients that do answer yes to both questions, a VPS may be a very beneficial solution to them.

At XeHost, we pride ourselves in offering very high-end and high-performance Virtual Private Servers. Here is a breakdown of some of the features that we offer:

8-Core Intel Dual Xeon CPUs- We utilize top-of-the line servers for all of our VPS plans. Budget hosts that run VPS plans often run them on budget servers, hindering the ability of the VPS to meet its full potential. We run our VPS’s on very high end servers to ensure that our VPS plans not only meet but can exceed their specifications (see Burstable RAM below).

RAID10 Disk Space- RAID10 technology allows a hard drive to keep running even if it has failed. While other hosts will experience hours of downtime in the event of a hard drive failure, our high-end drives can keep running even in the event of a hard drive failure. Our technicians will be able to place the failed drive with a new one with minimal to no downtime. Companies that do not utilize this technology will not be able to boot up their servers until the hard drive has been replaced.

Free Backup Disk Space- We understand how important website backups are and constantly emphasize it to our customers. On all VPS plans, we give you backup disk space at an offsite location at no additional cost so that you can backup all of your websites. We even provide industry leading software to help automate backups and ensure that they are taken daily.

R1Soft Enterprise Continuous Data Protection and Recovery- This industry-leading disastery recovery software comes standard on all of our VPS plans. This will allow you to automate frequent backups of your entire VPS and store them on the free off-site backup location that we give you. In the event that you ever need to restore your VPS to a previous date, you can rest assured that we have you covered!

Burstable RAM- On your VPS, we allot you a certain amount of dedicated RAM. This is RAM that you are guaranteed – your VPS will never have less RAM than this to operate. Between all of the VPS’s ran on the server, there is often an excess of RAM because not all VPS’s utilize all of their RAM at any given time. Burstable RAM is the maximum amount of RAM that your VPS can achieve. With our high end servers, you will often find that your VPS can utilize more RAM than we have actually allocated to you.

Virtuozzo Power Panel- Virtuozzo Power Panel is undisputively the best, most powerful, and most secure virtualization platform in the industry today. It comes with a higher price (meaning that budget VPS providers cannot offer you this) but we believe that it is a necessary cost to ensure complete customer satisfaction. With Virtuozzo Power Panel, you can start, stop, reboot, and monitor your VPS via a web-based control panel.

cPanel/WHM- cPanel/WHM is an industry-standard for control panel and website management. For web hosts, your clients will expect a control panel like this if they do business with you. cPanel/WHM licenses come at a cost and budget VPS providers do not eat this cost for you, meaning that you will have to buy your own license if you wish to offer it to your customers. At XeHost, not only do we offer our VPS clients cPanel/WHM for free but we also offer them Fantastico DeLuxe Auto-Installer – an addon software that enables customers to install many different popular PHP scripts with the click of a button.

Free Firewall Protection- We offer all of our VPS clients free firewall protection to help protect them against hackers, ddos attacks, and many other things that can affect the stability and reliability of their VPS.

24×7 Monitoring- Unlike other providers that require you to monitor your VPS, we will monitor it 24×7 to ensure that it remains online. In the event that it crashes, one of our technicians will immediately restart it for you. If the VPS does not start back up, we will contact you to make sure that you are aware there is a situation and so that you can investigate it accordingly, minimizing the downtime that you will experience.

These are just some of the many features that come with all of our VPS plans. To learn more, simply view the “Virtual Private Servers” section of our website.