Article in Hosting & Security

VPS's are growing in popularity, since they 1st were introduced to the web hosting industry and they became widely offered by a number of major web hosting companies, a discussion started about the what would be the best choice for small web hosts, a VPS or a reseller account, we shall examine the pros and cons of each to try and find a the best answer.

We will start with the pros and cons of a VPS, a VPS or a Virtual Private Server is basically like a reseller plan in terms of disk space and bandwidth, you would probably find that reseller plans come with more disk space and bandwidth than a VPS, however, a VPS has a number of advantages over a reseller account:

1- Root access: You usually get root permissions on your VPS, which in turn allows you to perform any action on your VPS, something that you cant do in most if not all reseller plans, this also gives you the ability to install your own software or scripts if needed, some also use VPS's for training and education purposes before moving to manage bigger dedicated servers. You can install new apache modules and compile your own shell scripts.

2- The Privacy and the Isolation: Probably one of the most important features that distinguish VPS's from reseller accounts, with a VPS, you are completely isolated from the rest of the VPS's and accounts installed on the server, which means more stability and security, for instance, if an account on a shared environment(reseller account) crashes the server, your reseller account will also crash along with the whole server, although non of the accounts on your reseller crashed the server, this will never happen with a VPS, if another VPS crashes for some reason, it crashes alone and all of the other VPS's on the server continue to function normally.

3- The 3rd advantage would be the dedicated resources each VPS usually comes with, each VPS usually comes with a minimum guaranteed CPU and memory usage for your VPS, which means no one can abuse the server resources or manipulate it for his account, in the worst case you would have your guaranteed CPU and memory to use.

A VPS is probably the best choice between a reseller plan and a dedicated server, if you reseller plan is giving you headaches with frequent downtimes, security problems or there are certain needs that your reseller account doesn't give you access to do, a VPS would be a logical step especially if your on a tight budget, it will give you more reliability and security which are the basics for any successful web hosting business.

Reseller Plans also have some advantages over a VPS, which include:

1- Maintaining the server: with a reseller plan you usually don't have to worry about server security, keeping your software up to date and the general management of the server which is usually taken care of from your reseller provider.

2- Cheaper: Reseller plans usually don't cost as much as VPS's, this is a plus especially for startup hosts.

To sum up, reseller plans are probably the best choice for one-man start up hosts with low budgets, a VPS would be a smarter choice on the long run.