Michael’s online store is slow and unresponsive. Once upon a time, Michael decided to save up on hosting and purchased a shared hosting — the same shared hosting that now runs a several large-scale projects. With Michael’s store growing and needing more resources too, he starts losing both money and clients.
Sounds familiar? Any shared hosting could be at Michael’s place. It’s called «shared» for a reason. And if you do not want to share, you need to purchase a VPS for your project.
VPS is a virtual server. Speaking broadly, it’s a piece of a server given to you and you only. VPS is more powerful, agile and sometimes even offers better value compared to shared hosting. And the most important thing is that you don’t have to share it.
When should I switch to VPS
Whenever you can afford it. If your project is profitable — it cannot depend on the factors outside of your control. So in order to be certain of its success — switch to VPS the second you can afford it.
And if we remove the money out of the equation, you should switch when your website begins to slow down. Or when it starts to reach the limits on your hosting.
IMPORTANT: You really should not wait until the very last second — then you’d have to hurry up the transfer, which is not simple by itself. The best way to do this is move a couple of weeks before you hit the limits.
Why switch to a VPS
You should switch to a VPS, because it provides more resources than your hosting and, most importantly, guarantees them. Which is why any project will sooner or later move to a VPS.
Guaranteed resources
Each user on gets some amount of resources dedicated to his account — for example, 256 MB of RAM and one CPU core. And at times, there may be 500-600 accounts on the single hosting server.
But the server does not have 600 CPU cores and 256 GB RAM — most of the time it is much more modest 8 core CPU and 64 GB RAM. Users just do not notice the lack of resources, since they do not need those resources round-the-clock. For example, a typical WordPress website that has 700-800 users per month won’t use even 2% of the resources it gets.
But at some point, someone will try to use this hosting for a project that needs those resources constantly — for example, a large online store with thousands of users. Then there will be another one, and another, until all users are out of resources and hosting admins have to step in and ask the heavy projects to move to VPS.
The VPS is not affected by anything like this. Each server has a guaranteed amount of resources. No more, no less. No one else has any access to those resources either, which means that you can run heavy projects easily.
Besides, a VPS has much more resources than a hosting. Even the more expensive plans do not offer more than 768 MB RAM, while the cheapest Unihost VPS has 1 GB RAM.
Dedicated IP
On the shared hosting, you also have to share your internet connection. And the problem is not that the bandwidth may not be enough for everyone.
Most websites on the same hosting server share the IP address. This means, that other services and structures cannot distiguish who exactly breaks their rules. Which means that if your «neighbor» sent out spam and got banned by Gmail, it’s easier to purchase the new IP or forget about sending mail overall.
Agile configurations
On a hosting, the server is managed by the provider. Which means, if the provider decides than PHP 7 is a heresy and PHP 5.6 is enough for everyone — you’ll have to make peace with it or look for a different provider.
But on the VPS, you are the provider. If you need PHP 7.2.0 RC5 — just install it! Or create a ticket for Unihost support team, who will do it for you.
More possibilities
Many web applications simply cannot work from hosting — they need superuser rights, which only admins have. For example, you can’t host a VPN — a connection relay to obscure everything you do on the Internet — on the shared hosting.
But on a VPS, you have the superuser rights, so simply install the software and webapps you need. Deploy the VPN, your personal file storage, music streaming service, Plex-server or Node.js development environment. You can even install Windows and run applications from it — for example, game servers.
No artificial limitations
Providers usually limit the hosting plans — for example, no more than 2 domains per account. Or no more than 10 mailboxes. And if you want more — simply purchase the addons or switch to pricier plans.
On VPS, you can run 1500 domains and 100 billion mailboxes and as long as it has enough resources, you will be able to use them.
How to switch to a VPS without going mad
Unihost offers ISPmanager 5 Lite control panel to any server, as well as free Basic Server Management service. With ISPmanager you can run the website just as if it was on our hosting, while with management you can lay all the issues with transfer to Unihost support team.
Also, Unihost Knowledge Base has a section on VPS, which shows how to install different software on your server. For example, here’s a manual on OpenVPN and Nextcloud.