As your websites grow, so does your hosting. If you’re wondering why you should switch to a VPS, there are several reasons:
You are not sharing a VPS with other random people. Although every hosting provider does its best to keep its servers as optimized and clean as possible, you never know what the other accounts hosted on the same shared hosting will do with their websites. When you switch to a VPS, you get your own private resources dedicated to you.
With a VPS, your website can have more visitors. Virtual servers generally process a lot more traffic than a shared host. If you share a server with more people and get all access to their websites, you consume most of the resources of the shared server. If you get peak traffic, you can slow down your server and increase the loading time. A VPS can handle a lot more traffic at once compared to a normal shared hosting account. So if you find that your website is growing and you are getting more and more visitors every day, it is time to switch to a VPS.
Your website is faster on a VPS. You don’t share your server’s resources with anyone, so you get much better performance. Your website will be noticeably faster if you host it on a VPS or a dedicated server. And we mean it really noticeably. Typically, website load time will be improved by at least 300% when hosted on a properly configured VPS.
Virtual servers are more secure if they are configured correctly. If you properly configure and protect your VPS, it is far more secure than a shared hosting account. Your virtual private server is private for you and only for you. With a VPS, there is less chance that someone else will access your data or resources if you explicitly grant them access, or, of course, if you don’t properly configure your VPS. If you don’t have the necessary experience to allow you to configure and manage a Linux VPS, we wouldn’t recommend doing it yourself. A simple misconfiguration in your web server configuration files or your database configuration can cause your website/app to stop responding. Some of our customers dive into their server configs, but they know that we have their back and can contact us at any time so we can help them or fix the problem if it exists. Our customers receive our first-class managed hand stop support, which we believe is one of the most important features of an established web hosting company.
When should you be transferred to a VPS
There are no strict rules or guidelines, but there are several indicators that can show that you need to upgrade to a VPS:
You start to get a lot of traffic. The main reason why most people switch from shared hosting to VPS is that they get an influx of traffic. Shared hosting accounts can handle low to medium traffic peaks. It also shares resources with other websites, which can seriously affect your website. A VPS gives you better and faster performance for your websites/apps.
You want to install an application that is not approved by your shared account. Most shared hosting accounts are limited to certain applications and services. If you use a VPS, you can, of course, install any application you want, provided that the hosting provider’s guidelines are followed. On shared hosting accounts, you are stuck with a PHP version chosen by your hosting provider. When you get a VPS, you can use the version of PHP you want, including PHP 7. You can install all the required PHP modules on your VPS. There are a number of applications that you cannot install on shared hosting because you do not have the necessary modules.
If you need more resources for emails, FTP accounts, databases, etc. Shared hosting accounts are usually limited by the number of email addresses and mailing options they can use. The same applies to FTP accounts, databases and other resources.
If you want to have more fun! Test different configurations, optimize different settings, learn new commands … Everything is fun, at least for us.
We can migrate your shared hosting account from your current provider to our VPS! MOVE TO A BETTER HOST
What to do after switching from shared to VPS hosting?
The switch can be pretty seamless if done correctly. After switching from your shared account, there are a few things you need to do on your server. Some of the most common practices include:
Connect to SSH. Before you can do anything, you must first log in to your server. You can connect to your Linux VPS using SSH.
Change your root password. The first and most important thing you should do on your server – change your default root password. Change it to a strong password. It is recommended that you use a different password for each service you use. Do not use the same password for your root account that you use for your email.
Update the time zone. Update your server’s time zone to the one you are in. The default time zone probably doesn’t match your own, so you’ll need to update it. You can also synchronize it with an external server.
Set up system locale if you want to use your VPS in a language other than English.
Create a sudo user. You must create a new sudo user with root access and then disable root access to the root username. The reason why you should do this is to avoid brute force attacks on your server when using the default username ‘root’. You should create a new user with a custom username and give the new user root access.
Secure SSH. There are many steps you need to take to secure your SSH. Some of them are changing the default SSH port, disable SSH login for the user ‘root’ setup passwordless login, set up two-step authentication.
Set up automatic updates. You should always keep your server and applications up to date. It is the right thing to do if you want to protect your data with all new features. Enabling automatic updates on a Linux server is a fairly simple task.
Install a firewall. No server is secure without a firewall! We recommend that you install and configure the Config Server Firewall on your VPS to make it more secure and to block unwanted attacks on your server.
Set up automatic backups. Always back up your data. It is the most important thing you have to do. Either do this manually or set up automatic backups.
Automate repetitive system tasks. Some system tasks repeat and you may need to perform them regularly. You can automate this with cron. This is optional and if you are a beginner you cannot configure it correctly.
Install a hosting control panel. Most VPS does not have a control panel, and you can only manage your server from the command line. Fortunately, you can also install a control panel on your VPS! You can manage your entire server with a hosting control panel. This includes creating and managing services and applications, working with FTP, email and database accounts, etc. You can even use the same control panel as before to seamlessly transfer the data from the shared hosting account to a VPS. Most commercial control panels are quite expensive if you buy an independent, single license, including cPanel. You can get a cPanel VPS for a lot less if you get it directly from a hosting provider. With our VPS hosting offers, we currently offer DirectAdmin and WHM / cPanel.
If you don’t want to use a control panel then you should install a LEMP , LAMP , MEAN or any other stack needed by your applications. You’ll need to install an FTP server and create accounts. Another thing you should do if you are not using a control panel is to set up a mail server. We have a number of tutorials on the subject, you can browse our blog and find more resources. This is a difficult task for beginners and they usually misconfigure something, then put their personal data on the perpetrator. We don’t recommend setting up your mail server if you don’t know what you’re doing. Contact us and we will install and configure your mail server correctly.
Try out different applications. There are a lot of self-hosted apps you can try. After all, you have a VPS and you are not limited to certain applications.
Contact us! We, help you set up your server and we take care of all the servers for you. We even offer free website migrations so we will migrate your website from your hosting account to another hosting provider for free! If you are not sure which plan to choose or if you need advice on your VPS, please feel free to contact us. We are available 24/7 via live chat or via ticket. We make the switch from shared to VPS as seamless and easy as possible.
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