What to Do with a VPS

In today's digital landscape, having a reliable and flexible hosting solution is crucial for individuals and businesses. Virtual Private Servers (VPS) have emerged as a popular choice due to their unique ability to strike a balance between shared hosting affordability and dedicated hosting performance. A VPS operates within a virtualized environment, offering exclusive resources to users while sharing the same physical server with other virtual machines. This dynamic hosting solution opens up possibilities for different scenarios, catering to a diverse range of needs and requirements.

In this article, we will introduce what VPS is, common uses and limitations of VPS hosting, and how to choose a suitable VPS server plan.

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtualized server that operates within a larger physical server. It is a popular web hosting solution that provides users with a dedicated portion of server resources, including CPU, RAM, disk space, and bandwidth, while sharing the same physical hardware with other virtual servers. After you logged in to the server, it operates just like a normal local computer with your choice of operating system and any other customizations.

VPS is like a dedicated server, where you can customize almost everything from operting system to security rules. If you are wondering if a VPS can be used for your project, mostly, the answer is yes. Here are some of the use cases.

Website Hosting: VPS is commonly used for web hosting, especially for small to medium-sized websites and blogs. It provides better performance and reliability compared to shared hosting, as resources are not shared with other websites. These sites can be built with popular software like WordPress, Drupal, phpBB, and Strapi. They can also be created from scratch with a specific language, like PHP, Java, and Python. Often, you need a database compatible with your website as well, be it MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, PostgreSQL. You can host the databases on another server, though.

Application Development and Testing: Developers often use VPS to build and test applications before deploying them to production environments. It allows them to experiment with different configurations and settings without affecting the main server. A VPS also makes it easy for remote development work. VPS allows developers to create isolated development environments, where they can work on projects without affecting their local machines.

E-commerce Websites: VPS is a popular choice for hosting e-commerce platforms. It provides a stable and secure environment to run online stores and process sensitive customer information. Popular ecommerce site builder includes Magento, WordPress, OpenCart, and Drupal.

Remote File Storage and Backup: Users can set up VPS as a remote storage location to back up important files and data securely. This ensures data redundancy and protection against potential hardware failures. For example, you can install your own cloud space with Owncloud and Nextcloud software. Users can use VPS to create online albums for all their photos and pictures.

Virtual Private Network (VPN): With VPS, you can create your own VPN, providing a secure and private network for accessing the internet or connecting remote locations. However, certain counties may prohibits this use and the associated IP can be banned. Therefore, the VPS hosting providers may not allow for this VPS use.

Game Servers: Gamers often use VPS to host private game servers, enabling them to control the gaming environment, set custom rules, and play with friends without relying on external hosting services.

Mail Servers: VPS can be configured as a dedicated mail server, handling email communication for personal or small business use. If your VPS IP address is used for abusive activities such as spamming, phishing, malware distribution, or being involved in a botnet, it can cause significant harm to your financial and reputational standing. In this case, the VPS hosting providers do not allow for such activities.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems: ERP systems are vital for businesses to manage various processes, such as inventory, finance, and human resources. Non-stop VPS ensures that critical business functions continue to operate seamlessly. Commonly used ERP and CRM software include Odoo, Dolibarr, ERPNext, OrangeHRM, and SuiteCRM.

Financial Services: Financial institutions, trading platforms, and payment gateways need uninterrupted services to process transactions, handle sensitive data, and ensure secure connections. VPS running 24/7 helps maintain the reliability and security of these services. Database Mart has served many clients for their needs for trading platforms like MT4, MT5, and Exness.

Data Analysis and Research: VPS can be employed to run data-intensive tasks, simulations, or scientific research, which require more computational power and resources than standard computers can provide.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): VPS can be used to set up virtual desktops, enabling users to access their desktop environment remotely from any device.

Some VPS hosting providers may choose not to support certain scenarios, such as email marketing or spam-related activities, due to various reasons, including legal compliance, maintaining server reputation, and ensuring a positive user experience for all customers. Here are some activities that may not be supported by VPS hosting providers.

Copyrighted content hosting and/or linking to pirated content
Open proxies
Stressers/booter websites
Mail/SMS bombers
Mass mail
IP spoofing
Network/port Scanning
Distribution of credentials and/or personal information
Denial of Service (D)DoS attacks
TOR exit nodes
Open DNS resolvers
Hola
Virtual currency (*coin) mining
World Community Grid, Folding at Home, or similar software
CrystalMines
HitLeap or any artificial traffic creation
HYIP websites
Vulnerability scanning
Bruteforcing
Cracking
Botnets
Illegal pornography
Hivemail
Destructive activities including but not limited to phishing,
malware and/or distributing malicious content Illegal activities including but not limited to ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, phishing, scam websites and pirating software
Multics, CCcam, or any other card sharing software

Additionally, some network ports are blocked by VPS hosting providers to ensure the services are not used maliciously and to protect machines from possible known vulnerabilities. Please check with the VPS hosting providers if you require more information on specific blocks.

To ensure that the VPS can meet your specific needs, there are factors you need to consider before buying a VPS server. These factors are often listed in the plan package. It's recommended to confirm with the team if you have any concerns or questions.

CPU: The processor, also known as the CPU, provides the instructions and processing power the computer needs to do its work. CPUs have processing units known as cores. The more cores a CPU has, the greater the number of instructions it can process in a given space of time.

RAM: RAM is used to store the program instructions and data currently being used by the CPU. Larger RAM space translates to more computing power.

Storage: There are mainly two types of storage: SSD and HDD. SSDs are considered much faster than the highest performing HDDs. Latency is also substantially reduced, and users typically experience much faster boot times.

Bandwidth: The higher the bandwidth, the faster the data can be transferred, which also means the faster your website can load. When looking for the best VPS hosting, a bandwidth of 100Mbps is more than enough to perform different uses.

Data center location: The closer your data center is to your website's visitors, the faster the loading speed of your pages. It is recommended that you keep your servers close by. Not necessarily within the same city. But it's better to keep it in the same country.

Uptime: Uptime is a measure of how long a computer or service is on and available. It is an industry standard to guarantee at least 99.9% service uptime. That means solution providers must have less than 90 seconds of downtime in a day, less than 45 minutes a month and less than 9 hours of downtime in a year.

Scalability: Normally, your applications or websites will grow over time and VPS server needs to expand the RAM and/or the disk space. The best VPS hosting provides you the ease of scaling or upgrade your plan, or even to customize your plan, anytime you wish, and with only a few downtime.

Technical support: 24/7 support means you can get help and find answers to questions as soon as they come up—24/7 and in real-time. It's especially important when downtime happens.

VPS hosting is more than just a bridge between shared and dedicated hosting. Its versatility makes it an optimal choice for a wide range of scenarios, from hosting dynamic websites and empowering e-commerce platforms to accelerating application development, managing resource-intensive tasks, and fortifying data security. By harnessing the potential of VPS servers, individuals and businesses alike can unlock a world of possibilities and ensure a smooth, reliable, and secure online presence for their endeavors. Whenever you have a question or concern about the VPS uses or how to choose your VPS server plan, you can always turn to the hosting support team.