The internet as a community is continuing to grow rapidly. With so many new websites being launched every single day, there are a huge amount of website developers. Websites such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook where all started from scratch.
A large percentage of unmanaged VPS customers are website developers, they use our service as a testing environment whilst they work on developing their scripts / software.
The important question is, why is a VPS important for a website developer?
A VPS (Virtual Private Server) offers totally dedicated server resources to you.
In the early stages of a website development project, the scripting can be messy and quite resource hungry. A shared web hosting provider needs to monitor their services for things like this. Due to the fact that shared web hosting will be sharing a server with hundreds of other customers websites, everyone has to play fair and use their fair share of server resources. A shared web hosting provider will kick you straight off of their servers if your script is taking up high server resources, or in a worst case scenario your code may even loop! This can cause the entire server to crash due to high CPU load. The host and it’s customers won’t be very happy if you loop their server.
You won’t have this problem with a VPS. If your script is using a high amount of server resources this effects nobody else but you. If your script loops, you can just reboot the VPS and fix the faulty coding. You won’t have complaints from your web host.
Improved server resource monitoring.
If you’re developing a website script, in most situations you’d want it to use as little server resources as possible. When the script goes live and the website has a lot of visitors, the more resource demanding your script is, the more money the website owner will need to spend on hosting it. For example, if you script is quite resource demanding and you have 100 visitors on your site at the same time, every time the visitor loads a new page, your server is processing multiple apache connections along with querying a database, etc. The more resource friendly the script is, will make the difference on whether you require an entire dedicated server or just a VPS to host your website. There can be quite a large price difference between the two hosting solutions, and when you are paying renewal fees constantly to keep the site online, it can be quite costly.
When developing your website script on a VPS, you will have full access to monitor your servers resource usage. This will help you with improving it’s resource efficiency.
Full control over the configuration of your server.
All scripts require the server to be set up differently. They require different Apache modules to be installed for parts of the code to operate correctly. A shared web hosting provider will have their servers set up in a way to provide the best overall service and security for their customers. They will have a lot of restrictions on their Apache configuration, this stops people using scripts to carry out certain actions, which may degrade the service for other customers sharing the server with you. If the shared web hosting provider doesn’t allow a certain mod to be enabled on their server, your script may not work correctly, and you cannot complete your development project.
With a VPS you have FULL control over how you configure the server. You can change the Apache configuration at any time to enable or disable certain modules.
No limits to how many databases or other features you can create.
You will find that shared web hosting providers often allocate certain packages with feature limits. They may only allow 1 database to be created on a certain package. This can be very restrictive for a website developer.
A VPS has no limits to how many databases, domains, email addresses or other features you can have. You are in total control of your own server, you can manage it however you like to suit your development project.
I hope you found this useful for your future development projects. There are plenty of VPS hosting providers about to suit any requirement, good luck in your hunt. If you have any questions, please leave a comment.
this post is very usefull thx!
About 6 years ago when we launched our first project VPS was very useful. It allowed us to run more robust scripts while keeping the cost down.
I have to come back to your post when I already begin my website. I don’t know some of the terms but this post is very useful for starters like me.
good information
Our customer need to tweak the php.ini. For example allowing to fopen urls or install imap tools (pear). VPS are the solution!
VPS is so important for website developers
Thanks for the great post! I totally agree with you. This is the better option for most design and development houses – at least on the small to medium size. The flexibility from a VPS can do wonders for those that can’t afford the cost of a dedicated box.