Think of it this way. VPS hosting is like having an apartment or a hotel room. You have your walls, doors, and a bathroom. You possess the privacy of your room and more or less can do anything you desire. Of course, the infrastructure will be shared with the other residents in the apartment building.

For comparison, a shared hosting account is like having a bed in a dormitory. You share a bathroom, common area and so on.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

In recent years Virtual Private Servers, or VPS for short have become more popular than dedicated servers because they offer superior performance and more control than shared hosting whilst costing less than dedicated servers.

With VPS hosting, you share a number of physical resources such as disk space CPU and RAM on a physical server even though they are allocated specifically to you, but you still enjoy the freedom of having a private server, such as having your own control panel. This way, the overall CPU and memory are shared across all accounts on the machine, but at the same time portions of those resources are always dedicated to each account

So with a virtual server you have the power and control of a dedicated server but you have the added advantage of scalability too.

Dedicated Servers

A Dedicated Server is a physical server that is reserved for your sole use. Whereas a virtual server shares hardware resources with other VPS instances, a Dedicated Server is completely isolated for your use only.

Its perfect for those who need the additional peace of mind that a secure servers brings as well as offering significant processing power for high resource demanding applications and websites. It ensures that third party activities do not affect your services.

Virtual Private Servers VS Dedicated Servers

When deciding which is the best web hosting package for you, it is important to weigh all the factors and then make the right choice for your business.

Flexibility & Scalability

Virtual Private Servers are extremely scalable with no downtime required to perform upgrades. Clients can self-provision their upgrade of hardware such as extra RAM, CPU or disk space.

On the other hand Dedicated servers do not scale the way a VPS can, especially a Cloud VPS which has huge potential for upward scaling. Dedicated servers are designed to provide a set amount of resources and the only realistic way of scaling their computing power is to add additional resources such as RAM modules or extra CPU units or even clustering the servers and balancing the load across multiple servers.

Also, it is worth noting that with a Dedicated Server you would need to over specify your requirements to take into account headroom for growth if you want to avoid downtime related to upgrades which would require an engineer to make the change.

Management & Reliability

In a Cloud VPS configuration a server is extremely reliable due to the fact that data is stored across several physical servers on the cloud.. In terms of cost this is the best option in terms of reliability and uptime.

To achieve similar reliability potential in a Dedicated Server would require additional hardware components namely additional hard drives, a RAID card to offer RAID capability and a dual power supply. This would require a physically larger, more powerful and ultimately more expensive server.

Suitability

VPS are suitable for high traffic websites, small business owners, bloggers and everyone that needs the power of a dedicated server at a lower price.

If this type of server cannot satisfy your needs due to your security requirements then a dedicated server is the best solution for you.

Security

Dedicated servers are more physically secure than VPS hosting due to the fact that you are the only client using that server. That does not negate the need to be vigilant and ensure that your server is protected and secure.

Cost

VPS are higher cost compared to shared hosting but less compared to dedicated servers. In terms of value for money a virtual private server offers a compelling business case when issues such as scalability and high availability are factored in.

Single Server VPS

This is a single physical server is split into several ‘virtual’ servers using a Virtualization software.
The advantage of this approach is that it is low cost to the hosting company as only one server is required to start offering virtual servers and only one licence is required. These savings can be passed on to the client so that the client has a cheap VPS option.
The downside of this approach is that everything is hosted on one server so there is the need to build redundancy into the server with dual CPU’s, Dual power supplies and hot swap hard drives configured in a RAID array. This may push the cost of the service up.
This approach does not offer any High Availability (HA) either as the server represents a single point of failure. What this means is that should the server experience a catastrophic issue which brings it down for any period of time then all clients on the server are affected.
Also this type of configuration is not suitable for live upgrades. For example, if more RAM is required this will require downtime to power down the server and add the extra RAM.
Virtual Private Servers can be managed or unmanaged. When it is managed, it means that the company in charge would do updates and upgrades of your server to make sure it is secure.

Multi Server (Cloud) VPS

A Multi Server (Cloud) VPS configuration avoids the single point of failure issues of a single server by pooling together the resources of several servers.The processing and data storage capacity of all of the servers in the cloud configuration offers a truly scalable and resilient infrastructure.
This type of configuration is more complex to set up than the single server option, but it offers both the hosting company and their clients some significant advantages:

– High Availability of data – data is stored on several separate servers
– High Uptime – no single point of failure
– No downtime upgrades
– Live migrations
– Different disk types can be offered (e.g. SAS and SSD)
– Instant provisioning (minutes to setup vs hours for Dedicated Server)

AKLWEB HOST offers the Multi Server (Cloud) VPS configuration on both our standard and (SSD based) Cloud SSD VPS. We do not offer single server VPS options.

What is really important to understand is that the Cloud VPS pools together the resources of numerous servers and can be scaled to dozens or hundreds of servers.

This means that data is spread across the cloud and processing power is shared. It is a very elegant and resilient solution. Because data is stored across several physical servers, the possibility of downtime or data loss are dramatically reduced. If one server fails completely the rest of the cloud continues working and the data is safe. Once the failed server is fixed it is brought back online and back into the server. The client will never notice any interruption in their service.