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VPS is widely regarded as a natural next step for businesses moving on from shared hosting. It is affordable, high-performance and, by its very nature, more secure, whilst offering significantly more resources for just a small increase in price. Whilst VPS may be the right choice, finding the best hosting provider and plan requires some careful consideration. Here are some important tips to help you make the right choice.
What will you be using the VPS for?
VPS solutions are available in a range of plans, each offering different amounts of resources, such as hosting, processing power and memory. You need to assess your business’s needs to determine what resources you will require now and in the foreseeable future; this should be one of the most important considerations when looking for a VPS plan, otherwise it may limit your company’s growth later on. Here are some of the most important areas of application for VPSs.
Large and high-traffic websites
The extra storage and processing power offered by a VPS is ideal for companies with one or more high-traffic websites. These additional resources enable your website to handle a large number of concurrent requests without affecting its speed and performance, ensuring fast loading times, smooth operation and high availability.
Installing other applications
As businesses grow, they generally install more applications for business use. In addition to their website, they may wish to use applications for remote working, employee monitoring, access control or any of the many other applications now used by businesses. A VPS not only provides hosting and resources to run these workloads, but also allows you to manage and configure the server in the way that best suits your needs.
Remember, the more applications you use and the more data you store, the larger plan you’ll need.
Other common uses for VPS
A VPS can be used for a wide variety of purposes. It can be used for developing applications and testing new environments, for private backup solutions, for hosting streaming and advertising platforms, and some individuals even use it to run game servers so they can play their favourite games online with their friends.
Whatever you intend to use your VPS for, make sure you carefully assess your current resource requirements and future hosting growth.
Latency and location
One issue that many businesses do not take fully into account is the location of their VPS server. However, this can have an impact in several ways. As data has to travel from the server to the user’s device, the further apart the two devices are, the longer the communication takes. This delay can have significant consequences. Firstly, the website loads more slowly on browsers located further away. This has been shown to increase the number of users who leave your website, and consequently reduces your conversion rate. Secondly, it slows down response times on your website, so when someone performs an action, there is an unnecessary delay before the expected result occurs (this is a serious problem for gaming servers); and thirdly, when search engines measure latency, they may downgrade your website’s ranking because it is not fast enough. As a result, your organic traffic may decrease.
Another important consideration is compliance. To comply with regulations such as the GDPR, you must ensure that personal data collected from EU citizens is secure. Whilst this can be ensured in countries that have adopted the GDPR – such as throughout the EU – the majority of the world’s servers are hosted in the United States, where US law enforcement agencies can access the data stored on them for national security reasons. In such cases, companies cannot guarantee data protection, and if the data is accessed, your business may be in breach of the regulations.
The tip here is simple: to ensure speed, responsiveness, SEO and compliance, make sure your VPS is physically hosted in the country where the vast majority of your users are located. Be careful, though: just because your web hosting is based in your country doesn’t necessarily mean that your servers are located there too. That’s why, at eukhost, all our data centres are located in the UK.
Expertise
As your business makes increasing use of IT, you will need more and more in-house expertise to manage the system and use the applications at your disposal. Upgrading to a VPS is a critical period in terms of IT expertise, as you will need to learn how to use the new platform, migrate your website and other applications, and set up any new applications you wish to use.
However, IT expertise is in short supply, and training can be expensive. Even if you do have this expertise, you may encounter problems where you need assistance. That is why it is crucial, when choosing a VPS solution, to select a provider that offers 24/7 expert technical support. A good hosting provider doesn’t just set up your VPS and migrate your website; they also manage the server so that you can focus on your business, and are always on hand to provide professional support whenever you need it.
Security
The rise of sophisticated cybercrime and increased compliance requirements mean that every business must treat security as a top priority. Although moving from a shared server to a VPS with its own operating system makes your system more secure from the outset, you must not overlook the security provided by your VPS provider.
Look for a VPS provider that offers a robust firewall with rules tailored to VPS, intrusion and DDoS protection, VPNs, malware protection and application security, SSL certificates, remote backup solutions, email filters and email signature certificates.