A Roller Coaster Ride with VPS Hosting

The Internet has become a movement, a revolution which has changed how things used to work a decade ago. Ironically, something which came into existence as a tool for remote communication for the U.S. army became part and parcel of everyone’s life within a short period of time. We can owe a movement which has made people living in duality.

Although it was the man who created the internet but, now they have become henchmen of smartphones and the world wide web. The word of the internet is being preferred over the word of god. Therefore, it has become crucial for them to have an ‘Internet existence’.

For that, we need Web Hosting. In simple words, it is a way to make information available online through a website which can be accessed by the general public. Web Space and Bandwidth are prerequisites for a website to get hosted.

Web Space:- It also goes by the name of storage space and disk space. This may be defined as a certain quantity of space is allocated by the web hosting providers to the owners of websites on a web server. It holds all the data displayed on your website including images, emails, text files, database, HTML codes, and other website files. Basically, it performs two functions:-

1. To provide a mechanism so that a website owner may upload any data or information related to his website on the internet which may be accessed by the general public.
2. It also allows the website owner to store files that hold important information about the website on the allocated space, provided that they are invisible to visitors.

Bandwidth:-

It may be defined as the rate at which a certain amount of data is transferred on and from the website. This enables a website to get featured on the world wide web. Websites that are allotted more bandwidth work faster and better. It depends upon the traffic which a website receives.

Websites receiving a large number of visitors are allotted higher bandwidth. It is sometimes confused with traffic. Traffic is data, quantifiable in terms of bits that are transferred from web servers.

If any visitor is consuming 50 Mb of data on a website then 50 Mb of traffic is generated between the web server and the website. If two visitors use the same amount of data then a website which is being allotted 100mb bandwidth would not be able to accommodate any other activity by a third user. It would probably get slower.

A web hosting server takes care of the security of the website, bandwidth, and webspace. A Data Center is a storage place, in physical or virtual form, owned by an entity serving web hosting services or networking systems.

Types of Hosting

Shared Hosting

This type of hosting is usually taken by individuals who receive low traffic on their website. They need less amount of space on servers and less processing on the CPU. In this, the same server hosts multiple websites simultaneously. They are given their part of storage or share on the web server. On a shared hosting server, all the website hostings share the operating system and resources.

They share resources like memory, IPs, operating systems, CPU, bandwidth, root access, storage, Internet connection, offered by a server. Therefore, if one site gets more traffic than required then it would use more bandwidth and increase traffic for the server which consequently can slow down other sites on the server.

This type of hosting has now become unpopular because it failed to deliver efficiently even if there were fast internet connections and also it failed to give independency to website owners. So, a need was felt to give other sophisticated and smart solutions based on ‘Virtualization’ which rules out frequent rebooting which trace its provenance in a paper published in 1974 by Popek and Goldberg.

Virtualization is the process or mechanism through which a virtual software is created out of actual hardware which helps IT services providers to make a hardware host multiple operating systems parallelly. It acts like different system altogether known as Virtual machine defined by Popek and Goldberg as “an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine”.  The physical hardware is known as Host Machine on which a Guest or Virtual machine runs. These virtual machines are run by Hypervisors or VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor). These may also be divided into Native and Hosted VMM. This helps in providing cloud VPS Hosting services.

Dedicated Server:–

In this, a user has all the resources of a server exclusively for himself. Usually, large organizations and enterprises avail these services whose website feature intricate applications and designs, receive a large amount of traffic, and need a large quantity of storage and bandwidth. It is the costliest mode of hosting.

VPS Hosting:-

It is a hybrid of shared and dedicated hosting as it gives you the privacy and safety of a dedicated server hosting and feasibility of shared hosting. Here, by incorporating virtualization mechanism a large server is divided into small Virtual Private Servers which are used exclusively by different website owners. Because of its exclusiveness. It is also known as Virtual Dedicated Server. So, a particular part of a server is exploited by a website without the interference of other websites.

The structure of a VPS is based on virtualization of Operating Systems which kernel allows us to exploit extensively the resources of a server like its hardware and software. Each VPS acts like a dedicated server as it has exclusive root access, IP addresses, applications, files and data, processors, and can be rebooted separately.

Therefore, VPS is the most cost-effective solution for website owners by which they can enjoy all the advantages of a dedicated server with the viability of shared hosting.

Sanchita Mittal is devoted her life to content writing and she works at go4hosting.