Most Web Hosting companies offer "virtual" or "shared" hosting. Shared hosting is a great way for businesses to get a cost-effective web presence, but it does have some limitations. In a shared hosting environment, you share your resources, applications and mail with potentially hundreds of other users in the same directory. This configuration can allow any compromises or bad coding from a single website owner to affect the performance of everyone else on the same server.

With Virtual Private Server (VPS), also known as Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) technology, a web server is divided into multiple isolated environments. Each "virtual environment" has its own root server software providing complete isolation for that website. Any compromise or bad scripting issues related to a single site would only affect that VPS and could not affect any other websites on the same server.

Just like with a dedicated server, each VPS has its own independent operating system with its own web server, mail server, ftp server, dns, and independent software instances. A crashed resource or application (Apache, Sendmail, MySQL etc.) in another client's VPS would have no effect on your VPS. In addition, since you have your own mail server and static IP, you never have to worry about having your domain email "blacklisted" because someone else on the server was accused of spamming.

Below is an illustration of the difference between shared and VPS hosting. If you think your company could benefit from VPS hosting, contact us today and we'll be happy to answer your questions and see if it makes sense for you to upgrade to a VPS.