If you are a business owner, then you are almost always thinking of ways you can cut down on costs while maintaining a place at the fore of technology. And in most instances, it is your online presence that can help you in both regards. Without an online presence it is, quite frankly, almost impossible to remain profitable.

Commerce is rapidly moving online and a very low percentage of medium- to-large businesses remain offline today. The world is getting more and more connected and the main customer-base is the faceless online visitor that makes purchases electronically.

That having been said, one of the critical decisions you will have to make is what hosting solution you should choose to take care of your website and ecommerce requirements. A good choice is a virtual private server hosting.

What is it?

Abbreviated to VPS, a virtual private server is a server that runs a virtual version of a complete operating system and is offered as a service by a hosting provider.

As far as you, the client, are concerned, you will see no difference in compatibility and execution between your VPS and a physical server that was actually loaded with an operating system.

 When Should You Opt for VPS?

There are several ideal scenarios that would make you an ideal candidate for VPS hosting. Here are a few:

You Can’t Afford Your Own IT Department: if you can’t afford to run your own servers and pay for their upkeep, your safest bet would be to go for the services offered by hosting providers.

Obviously the best solution to choose from the numerous services they provide would be a dedicated server, where you are the master of everything on it. But that comes at a price – a very steep one, it should be said. This brings us to…

You Can’t Afford a Dedicated Server Hosting: if you can’t afford to hire a full server, you are an ideal candidate for VPS.

Because one server can be installed with multiple instances of the same or different operating systems, it is much cheaper to purchase. A hosting provider will usually divide a server into multiple VPSs and rent each instance to its customers. This means the overhead of the server is divided among these customers which makes it a shared expense and, hence, quite cheap.

You Want Full Control of Your Server: the beauty about VPS hosting is that it is, for all matter and purpose, a standalone server. This means you can do as you wish with it (intentionally or otherwise), and it wouldn’t adversely or directly affect other customers’ servers.

This means the hosting provider can offer you full and absolute control of your server without putting its service at risk. You, on the other hand, will be able to treat your VPS just like you would any physical server in your own server room.

You Don’t Want to Care for Servers: a VPS is a server but the key word is “virtual,” which means you have a server without the hardware. This means you don’t need to worry about the physical server and all the costs it ensues for its upkeep, security, maintenance, expansion/upgrade, overhead etc.

Flexibility and Options are Abundant: your VPS server can be anything – within reason, that is – you want it to be. You can install whatever operating system you choose on it and then add any application you may want to use or share.

If you don’t feel like it is all going well, you can scratch it all and start rebuilding your server again. If you have outgrown the resources that are on offer with your hosting plan or want to add an extension, your server can be upgraded without any downtime.

Increased Security: when you host your website or ecommerce site on your own servers and inside your own network, you are doing so at the risk of your own security. Any attack on your site could actually be foreseen as an attack on your network. Should the attack succeed, your network and everything on it could be up for grabs by the hackers.

With a VPS hosting solution, anyone that manages to get past the providers’ security features (which by the way will almost always be better than what you, as an IT outsider, could probably put in place with your own servers) will only be able to access a virtual server that is isolated from not only your network, but also the other virtual servers. The attack is contained within one specific server instance.

You Have Round-the-Clock Tech Support: you have to admit that it is really a great relief to know that should anything go wrong you will have someone out there to handle it for you.

You don’t need to worry about whether or not your administrators will be able to handle the task – it’s the hosting providers’ job to come up with a solution no matter what.