Every business needs an online presence, including a moving company. At the center of that online presence is your official website. So it’s important to make sure that it represents you well, it looks good, and it always runs smoothly. You can hire Movers Development to design and maintain your pages, but your website doesn’t just float around on the internet – it has to be hosted somewhere. So before you start thinking about color schemes and blog posts, take the time to learn about different types of hosting, their upsides, and their drawbacks. The speed, availability, reliability, and security of your website will all depend on choosing the right hosting. And these benefits of using VPS hosting may just sway you in the right direction.
What is VPS hosting?
VPS hosting stands for virtual private server hosting. It is best understood in comparison with the other two types of hosting you should consider for your business – shared hosting and private servers.
We tend to think of the internet as an immaterial object. But the truth is that all the data that makes up the internet needs to be stored in some type of hardware. This hardware is known as a server. But maintaining a physical server can be hard and expensive work. So most small businesses don’t deal with that. Instead, they rent space on a server maintained by a company dedicated to this work: a web hosting provider. This means you have three options:
- running a private server, where you either rent or own the hardware itself
- opting for shared hosting, where you and other businesses share the same server
- using a virtual private server, which combines the best of both worlds – renting out space on a shared server but having full control of your dedicated resources
There are two key aspects of VPS to consider here: the fact that it’s virtual and the fact that it’s private. Since the server in question is virtual, you won’t have to deal with the hardware side of things. Your hosting provider does that. Since it is private, you won’t have to deal with the issues of sharing. Although your VPS is hosted on a physical server shared with other businesses, it is partitioned to be separate from other virtual servers on the same physical platform. This means you get your own operating system, disc space, and bandwidth. You can run any moving industry software you want, regardless of what anyone else is doing.
The biggest benefits of using VPS hosting for a business
The most widespread choice of hosting among small businesses is shared hosting because of its many benefits. But you should keep your options open because VPS hosting comes with many benefits.
VPS hosting is cost-effective
As a business owner, you’ll need to set a budget for your business. In order to do that, you have to take into account all the different expenses of running a business. Web hosting is one of those expenses. It may seem logical to just go with the cheapest option (shared hosting in this case) to save money. But what you should really be thinking about is how to get the most bang for your buck. VPS hosting does away with the worst problem of shared hosting – not having your own allocated disc space and bandwidth. With many other websites on the same server, yours could end up running slowly or not at all. But with VPS, you won’t have that problem. And that’s worth paying a little extra for.
You can easily scale resources as your business grows
As your business grows, so will your server needs. VPS hosting is easily scalable to accommodate this growth. Since your server is private and you have full control of it, you can increase the RAM and CPU capacity to suit your needs completely independently of other businesses.
VPS hosting is reliable and fast
When you have your own disc space and bandwidth, you never have to worry that your moving company website will crash because someone else is using up the RAM of a shared server. Instead, your website will be reliably available with a consistent loading speed. This is very important – uptimes and speed greatly affect the success of a website.
Your website will be secure
Most hosting providers will offer some form of a security package. But with VPS hosting, you can go a step further. Since you’re in full control of your server, you can implement additional security options yourself. This can protect you from all sorts of hacking attempts. As a moving company, you’ll be dealing with a lot of sensitive and private information, including people’s home addresses. So it’s imperative to protect this data and VPS hosting can help you do that better.
You will have access to technical support and customer service
Unlike shared and private hosting which puts the burden of troubleshooting, fixing issues, and maintenance on you, VPS hosting services typically come with customer service. Even if the technical support provided isn’t free, it will be more affordable than the alternative. Your other option is keeping your own technical support on the payroll which can end up costing you a lot more in the long run.
Don’t just focus on the benefits of using VPS hosting – learn about the disadvantages too
When making a decision as important as the type of hosting, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of all your options. So in addition to the benefits of using VPS hosting, you should be familiar with its drawbacks. For starters, VPS hosting isn’t exactly cheap. It’s cost-effective and more affordable than a private server. But it costs significantly more than shared hosting. You need to decide if all the benefits of it are worth the price.
More importantly, however, you need to know how the resources are allocated to different virtual private servers before signing a contract. If you choose the wrong provider and they distribute resources poorly, you could end up facing the same issues you would while using shared hosting. The key to avoiding this is choosing a good hosting service.
