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6 Guidelines for Choosing the Right VPS Hosting Company

Is your current shared hosting no longer enough for your growing website? Are you looking to change your VPS provider? Are you confused about choosing between shared and VPS hosting?

If the answer to any of the above questions is a yes, then you are at the right place. Here we take a look at six guidelines that you can refer to choose the right VPS hosting company for your website.

1. Uptime Guarantees

Probably the most underrated factor when searching for a new VPS provider, the uptime guarantee denotes the amount of time your website stays up without any downtimes and is expressed as a percentage. Practically speaking, 100% uptime is not possible. That said, aim for an uptime figure that is as close to 100% as possible. Most reputed VPS providers advertise an uptime of 99.99% as they know downtimes are inevitable.

2. Price

A VPS service is usually classified by most companies into three types; unmanaged hosting, unmetered hosting and managed hosting. Both unmanaged hosting and unmetered hosting are cheaper than managed hosting. However, with the latter you are offered a 24×7 server monitoring service that takes complete care of your VPS. Choose one that suits your needs the best.

That said, a VPS is still amazingly cheaper than dedicated hosting. A typical VPS account starts from roughly $40 /month. For a dedicated server with similar specs, expect to shell out a minimum of $100 or more.

And this is probably one of the most proven ways of identifying a good Open VZ or Xen VPS provider. Just see if the provider a money-back guarantee. This option allows you to discontinue your subscription and get a refund in case the hosting service falls short of expectations.

3. Security  

A good provider of virtual private server hosting will have paid due attention to the security aspect. Apart from adequate security mechanisms and checks, ensure the provider has Secured Socket Layer (SSL) certificates in place. Although not mandatory, these are signs that the company has relevant experience and above-par capabilities in the area of server security.A bonus here would be a 24×7 monitoring service for your server. For instance, if your site undergoes a DDoS attack, it will be reduced to an absolute crawl. With round the clock monitoring service, such security breaches can be dealt with in a timely manner.

4. Limitations

While your website’s current traffic might not require an upgrade in the server specs, things can change and change fast. As such, find out if the VPS provider offers a clear and affordable server upgrade path. If a company shies away from offering these details or offers only a handful of VPS packages to choose from, you might want to look elsewhere.

4. Hardware

Even the best VPS can be hampered by the lack of adequate hardware resources; which is why you should try and squeeze in as much powerful hardware as you can. For starters, do not buy a package that offers anything less than 512 MB of memory. Ideally, at least 1 GB of memory is ideal since it makes for a quick-loading and lag-free website. Always remember, there is no such thing as too much RAM.

5. Features    

The right provider will bundle features that are relevant to your website with your chosen VPS package. Examples of this include MySQL databases, PHP, e-commerce features, free domains included etc. Moreover, as bandwidth gets cheaper by the day, more and more VPS providers are offering unlimited bandwidth across all their plans. However, it is better to check the fine print and see if this unlimited feature is only for hosting images and static files. There’s a possibility that your website has a high number of audio and video files, which might not be covered under the unlimited criterion.

As a concluding guideline, search the web and ask among peers for reviews about a VPS provider that successfully ticks each of the above-explained points. Most likely, it will have good reviews. But in case it does not enjoy a good reputation among your peers, keep looking. That is because while advertised and claimed features are one thing, actual reviews from users are totally another. We’ll recommend you stick to the latter.

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Written by Eric Foley

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