An Introduction to Virtual Private Servers

If you have been looking around for a hosting solution to set up your business, then there is a chance that you have seen the term “VPS” here and there. This article will help you understand what a VPS is and how it works.

The term VPS stands for the words Virtual Private Server, a low cost alternative to dedicated server hosting, with fewer advantages. Basically, it is a virtual machine confined to the space of a real computer.

VPS are created by using special software applications, called “Virtualization Environments”. These applications, although (technically speaking) not entirely the same thing, work much like those popular console emulators that allow you to play old console games in your computer, as if they were played in the console itself.

A virtualization environment, once installed in a real computer, allows the system’s administrators to create, destroy or modify one or more “virtual computers”, each running its own operating system and applications, independently from each other. These are the Virtual Private Servers.

From a company’s point of view, VPS represent a low cost alternative to setting up a real server, because not only the hardware costs are significantly lower but also because it takes less IT people to take care of several servers. Although the hardware investment on a powerful computer capable of hosting many VPS may be a bit higher initially, the fact that its resources will be split in several parts that will be sold independently allows them to lower the effective costs and offer attractive prices to their customers.

Virtual Private Servers have many of the advantages of a true dedicated server, but they are in fact a special case of shared hosting, with the difference that the real server hosts virtual computers instead of websites directly. It is important to keep this in mind, because of the fact that processor, memory and network resources are still essentially shared and non-exclusive to any of the hosted VPS.

Like a dedicated server, a VPS allows the administrator to perform tasks like remote rebooting and custom component installation; perhaps even in a better way due to their virtual nature: restarting a VPS is typically faster than restarting a true server, because basically it’s like closing and reopening an application. On the other hand, resource-hungry applications running on a VPS may decrease the amount of resources available to other VPS that may be hosted in the same machine.

There are two main types of Virtual Private Servers, depending on which kind of virtualization environment is used. Some of these environments work by defining independent virtual computers but not limiting the system resources assigned to each one of them, providing access to these resources on demand, instead. VPS set up this way are typically more flexible, in the sense that they can be modified (i.e. resized) without interrupting their functioning.

Other virtualization environments are stricter when it comes to splitting resources: they physically limit the hardware resources each one of the virtual machines can use. VPS created this way require a reboot of the real computer each time they are resized, thus interrupting access to any other hosted VPS until the system is back on.

On the other hand, these VPS are less likely to consume co-hosted VPS resources, and are more stable because memory overlapping and other undesired effects can be avoided; they work very much like a hard disk partitioning tool, which makes several virtual hard drives in the same physical disk, but they don’t actually share the same space. In the VPS world, this type of virtualization environment assigns exclusive memory, bandwidth and hard disk space to each one of the created VPS.

Well, this is all for now. I hope this article helps you clarify the concept. Who knows, maybe a VPS is exactly what the doctor prescribed for your business!

Stefan Holm
Dedicated Server Advisor Team