VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server) Review
After registering tons of hosting accounts (and dropping many), I’ve realized that plain old shared hosts aren’t so great - especially if you’re earning money through your online business. Most of these hosts claim that they have a 99.7% uptime. I think they’re just praying that you don’t complain and ask for some credit. I have a theory about this. I’m sure that these hosts had a great uptime when they first started, but as more people started going online, creating websites, and running a bunch of scripts, these hosting companies were faced with more issues (and more downtime).
Here’s something to back up my theory… Last year I had a host that had an uptime of close to 70%. Yeah, that’s pretty bad. Well it wasn’t their fault totally. One of the guys that I was sharing the server with was running mass spamming scripts. These scripts were supposed to run on autopilot…but they were taking to many resources and crashing the server. So when he crashed the server, he pretty much shut down my business. It would take some manual effort sometimes to get the site back up. I would have to email the hosting company to tell them that my site was down and they would restart the server.
With VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server hosting), you have to worry about these issues a lot less. Your account is shared, but you’re virtually on your own. These sites use something like VMware so they can run multiple environments on one server. So if the spammer was to crash his end, it would not effect mine.
So how much does all of this cost? Well, if you get a starter package, you can start at close to $4 a month. That’s not so bad considering that many others are charging alot more. The one that I’ve used is called Westhost. They don’t run on Cpanel. If you don’t know what CPanel is, or you don’t use software that requires Cpanel, don’t worry about it. This is a great host to use if you want something that is affordable and reliable. When your business starts demands more resource, you can upgrade your package to allow more bandwidth and space, or even get their VPS dedicated server package.