What is a VPS (Virtual Private Server)?

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtualized server environment that operates within a physical server, leveraging hypervisor technology to partition resources such as CPU cores, RAM, storage, and network bandwidth into isolated virtual machines. Each VPS runs its own operating system (e.g., Linux distributions like Ubuntu or CentOS, or Windows Server) and provides users with root or administrative access to a dedicated portion of the physical server’s resources. Managed by a third-party hosting provider, VPS hosting combines the cost-efficiency of shared hosting with the performance and isolation of dedicated servers.

What is a VPS used for?

VPS hosting supports a range of technical use cases, providing scalable and customizable environments for developers and IT professionals:

Web Application Hosting: VPS enables deployment of web applications using stacks like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js). For instance, a web application requiring 2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM, and 50 GB SSD storage can be deployed with consistent performance, unaffected by other tenants on the physical server.
Development and Testing Environments: VPS provides isolated sandboxes for software development and testing. For example, a development team can use a VPS to simulate production environments, testing application updates or microservices on a server with 8 GB RAM and Ubuntu 20.04, minimizing costs compared to dedicated hardware (Red Hat, 2022).
Secondary Storage and Services: VPS can host file servers (e.g., using Samba or NFS), email servers (e.g., Postfix or Microsoft Exchange), or backup solutions, leveraging scalable storage options like NVMe SSDs or HDDs for centralized data management.