If you are serious about your online business, you may wish to take a closer look at VPS hosting. What exactly is VPS? And how does it benefit your business?

VPS is short for Virtual Private Server. A VPS hosting plan gives you complete control over your own hosting account. It's almost as if you are the owner of a dedicated server. However, a VPS is not the same as having a dedicated server. It is just a virtual segment of the server. In other words, there may be other hosting accounts on the same machine, but these accounts do not impact your VPS account. The virtual segment is created using special software, and the goal here is to allocate dedicated resources to you without having to setup a new machine.

This allows you to enjoy all the benefits of running a private server without having to undertake the costs of setting up a dedicated server. A VPS hosting account may cost you between $50 to $100, depending on the amount of resources allocated to your account. A dedicated hosting account can easily cost you $200 or more each month. So by using a VPS account to host your sites, you enjoy a massive savings of 50% or more upfront. Now let's take a look at some of the benefits of owning a VPS account.

1. Administrative rights and access.

A VPS account gives you full admin rights. It's almost as if you are running the server in your own home. You are given virtual access to the root directory of the account. You may then install and configure the server anyway you like. Remember, whatever you do doesn't affect all the other accounts on the same server (and vice versa). So you are free to pretty much do what you like with the server.

This is important for some webmasters because some software require special components to function properly. But you can't install third party components in a shared hosting environment. You can, however, buy and install third party components on a VPS account.

2. Cost savings.

Compared to a dedicated server, a VPS hosting account offers immense cost savings. You do not, however, enjoy the same amount of resources that you get with a dedicated server. For this reason, a VPS account is ideal for mid-sized websites. You don't really need a full-fledged server to run your site, but you do require dedicated resources. In this case, a VPS account is perfect.

3. More reliability.

In shared environment, you never know when an inexperienced webmaster may bring the whole machine down. This happens from time to time because webmasters upload scripts that hog too much resources. If the server goes down, everyone is affected. However, if you are using a VPS account, you don't have to worry about what the other webmasters are doing. The resources are dedicated to your account and you will not be affected adversely. If reliability is important to you, paying a little more for a VPS account may be worth it.