Discover the benefits you get with windows VPS hosting

A teen is enjoying his favorite 3-d game with his friends all connected remotely.A security conscious, data administrator is managing an electronic billing system on a Virtual Private Network. A company is offering ASP hosting services. Now what  do they all have in common? They are all using a Virtual Private Server.

What is a VPS?

A virtual private server  is an instance of an operating system virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service.

Here is a layman’s analogy:

Each tenant in a building rents out floor space according to his needs. All the tenants are supplied with water and electricity line then billed according to one’s consumption. Similarly, a VPS customer “rents” out space and other resources on a server and gets billed according to the usage of these resources.

Any OS can be run on Virtual Private Server. In this article, we will focus our attention on a VPS running on windows.

Why you may need a windows VPS.

1. You want full control of your web server

Windows is the best platform to deploy ASP based applications. By default, internet information services (IIS) is included in all windows server installations. Additionally, one can run most common web based technologies. If IIS is not to your liking, you can deploy Apache web server.

For your database connectivity, you are spoilt for choice. There is a Microsoft based SQL server commonly used alongside asp.net.For the open source developers, Mysql and Postgresql will run smoothly. If this describes your tastes then you need windows VPS.

You may also need a VPS as a development server. You can quickly set up a WAMPP (windows apache Mysql, PHP and Perl) environment to mimic your production environment and test the limits of your software. You  can also use the VPS like a Git repository for your code.

There’s a common phrase among VPS users:

If it runs on windows, it will work on your VPS server.

2. You want to manage mails yourself.

If you are not comfortable with your mail being hosted by a third party, then you need  VPS. Introducing smartermail, an email management software that will get you sending and receiving mails in minutes. It does more than just email management; you can sync contacts, calendars and tasks from Microsoft outlook, Apple mail and even smart phones running on windows, android or apple.

3. You have a short term resource intensive hosting project

Let’s say your site is expecting a spike in traffic as the election campaign kicks in. There will be frequent updates and the site cannot afford to be down. Majority of websites run on shared hosting as it is the cheapest service as compared to VPS and shared hosting.

Now there arises a dilemma on whether to move to a dedicated hosting or a VPS platform. To save you the headache, here’s our take: go to VPS. Why?, a dedicated hosting may be fast and undoubtedly reliable given the fact that you have your own resources for your site. However,it will seriously dent your wallet with the high cost for services-some of which you may not be using.

On the other hand, the pocket friendly VPS option allows you to pay only for the resources you use and scale up as the consumption increases. In that case you can migrate your site to a VPS service provider, point your domain accordingly and you are good to go! After the high traffic period ends, then you can go back to the cost-friendly VPS hosting.

If this sounds plausible, you need windows VPS hosting!

4. You have a business critical online system.

Business-critical systems are systems on which business performance is heavily dependent. An e-commerce system aptly falls under this category. Setting up an e-commerce system on a hosting whose resources are unreliable may make your e-commerce site unavailable at times. As a result, customers will shy away from transacting on your site and this could spell doom for your business.

High traffic sites that generate revenue from online advertising need VPS if not a dedicated server. If your site content is attracting over a hundred thousand unique visitors per day, then it’s ad revenue is enough to support a VPS hosting package. With VPS your site will load faster and thats a key to maintaining site visitors.

Windows is the most popular gaming OS.Game developers will agree with me that a game server is business-critical. For the players to get value for the game they are paying for, the server must render graphics in real time. These two facts necessitate a windows VPS hosting.

5. Your site is scaling up and you want an reliable hosting

You may find your business is expanding and as such requiring more data storage and consuming more bandwidth. With a VPS plan, you can place your systems on a hosting that will grow with you. No more being locked out because you have exceeded the bandwidth (common in shared hosting).Just scale up to a higher VPS Package and your site will continue running.

Advantages

Administrator privileges on the server.

The OS is all yours! Customize it, tweak it and even get rid of any apps that you don’t need. Do whatever pleases you (within reasonable limits of course). You can set up a bot or run a cron job as frequently as you want.

Reliability of resources.

The OS on a VPS runs on a redundant hardware. A faulty hard disk can be replaced without even a second of downtime on your server, since there is a mirror instance of your OS environment. There is also an emerging trend of using SSD (solid state drives)as opposed to HDDs(hard disk drives).SSDs have no latency experienced by HDDs when accessing data across disks, and thus SDDs are faster.

Security

A VPS is not entirely hack-proof, but it’s definitely more secure. If a hacker accesses a shared hosting account, one can navigate to other accounts and reign terror on them as well.However; in a VPS, a hacker cannot launch massive attacks on multiple accounts.

Dis-Advantages

Costs: Normal hosting can go as low as $4 per month whereas windows VPS is about $30/month.

Risk of shared IP’s: Some companies can short change you by deploying the VPS on a shared IP. Sadly, if that IP is blacklisted, so is your server.

Our take

The costs may be slightly high, but you get great performance and security in return. Besides, its fun when you get to   be  an admin   on your own virtual server. A windows VPS hosting is definitely worth investing in.