Yesterday I moved the blog from a virtual host to a VPS cloud server. I imagine many webmasters agonize over choosing between virtual hosting and a VPS.
Why did I choose a VPS? Not because resources were insufficient. I’m a computer-science major, so I didn’t open the site just to run a site — a virtual host’s freedom is too low and you learn little, so I switched to a VPS. That’s the main reason.
Let’s look at the benefits of a VPS:
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Exclusive resources. A VPS is a small server carved out of a real physical machine; CPU, memory, and bandwidth are exclusive and absolutely isolated, which is fairer. On a virtual host, although CPU and such are limited, you still share with others — when a neighbor gets busy, yours shrinks.
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Freer configuration. A VPS has its own operating system and its own IIS, etc. You can restart your IIS, restart your server — a virtual host can’t. You can also build your own environment: PHP version, IIS version, which database to use — all up to you. This does require some server knowledge.
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Seamless configuration upgrades. If one day the bandwidth, CPU, or memory isn’t enough, you can pay the price difference through the management panel to upgrade. A virtual host can only get more resources by continuously upgrading to a bigger plan.
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A dedicated IP lets you set an SSL certificate for HTTPS access. If the site is e-commerce and involves finance, security requirements are stricter; you may need an SSL certificate for secure HTTPS access. Applying for an SSL certificate requires a dedicated IP, which a virtual host can’t set up for encrypted access even if it has one, because you can’t configure the web container.
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More services available. With a dedicated IP and a dedicated OS, you can offer any service to the internet, not just HTTP web service — you can also provide FTP service, DNS resolution service, and so on. A virtual host can’t.
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Multiple sites. With a VPS you can host multiple sites; how many depends on your traffic and VPS specs. If the VPS is powerful enough, you can host countless sites.
Now the downsides of a VPS:
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Expensive — high site-building cost. Compared with a virtual host, a VPS is much pricier, because resources are exclusively yours, so the price may be more than ten times that of a virtual host, or even higher.
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Higher technical requirements. Because server maintenance and environment setup are on you, it demands more of the webmaster; it’s best to have your own technician maintain the server when necessary.
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Because of the exclusive resources, I could also enable page compression; Baidu gave a three-star rating (it used to be one star). But I think it should be four stars — because the page carries Baidu’s ads, analytics code, and recommendation widgets, which need off-site JS. I can’t control off-site resources; they aren’t my site, so some JS wasn’t compressed and points were deducted. Otherwise I think it’d earn four stars.
