How useful are they? Who are they for? These are some of the most commonly-asked questions. Well today, I’m going to explain what they do and who would be looking for them.

Well, it all started back in the day when sites outgrew shared hosting (it’s hard to believe I know…) but you can actually outgrow a shared hosting account (i.e. get too many hits, need too much CPU and/or memory time). There was a need for a solution between shared hosting (where lots of people share one server) and a full blown dedicated server (which can be very costly).

So the industry improvised a VPS (Virtual Private Server).

A VPS is an virtually isolated box within a box. For example, you can imagine one big box and within this big box there are 10 smaller boxes; well that’s how a VPS works. Each VPS is like its own server. It has its own Operating System (OS) and applications such as MySQL, PHP, etc… so you are never sharing anything with other customers on the VPS server.

Who would need something like this? There are many folks that will use such services, for example; high demand sites (WP blogs and Forums), Resellers, Developers, and that’s just to name a few.

They would be useful for developers as you have full root access and can install anything you would like, and run any application that you need. That is why they are considered a great intermediate step between Shared and Dedicated.

Bookmark This Article