What is Managed VPS Hosting and What is the Best VPS Hosting?
We have talked a lot about shared hosting in the past, but after your blog starts getting decent traffic, shared hosting is not ideal. You need to increase your blog’s hosting infrastructure, and the next step is to go for Managed VPS Hosting.
Note: There are unmanaged VPS hosts too, which are cheaper, but if you are one of those people who doesn’t like getting their hands dirty with shell commands, managed hosting is what you want. Speedehost is one of the best platforms to manage your web hosting servers.
You’ve probably heard a lot about HostGator and Bluehost. Though we don’t have any issue with our shared hosting accounts, if our traffic starts increasing, we’ll need to move to a dedicated server or a VPS.
For some of my smaller sites, shared hosting is ideal, but for a big site like ShoutMeLoud, shared hosting is not practical. Dedicated web hosting is expensive, so a VPS is really the best option.
Managed vs. Unmanaged VPS
For an unmanaged VPS account, you will need to know how to do everything with Command prompts. If you are technically good with Linux, an unmanaged VPS server will offer you more control and will be cheaper.
But if you don’t know anything about Linux, and you want everything to be the same as your shared cPanel environment, you should go for managed VPS web hosting.
In Managed VPS Hosting, the web hosting provider handles all the server-related issues. Despite the benefit of having the technical know-how of managing your server, managed VPS Hosting makes your workload lighter by doing all the heavy lifting.  Managed VPS Hosting is more like an auto-pilot. Upon take off, the auto-pilot does pretty much everything as it guides the plane through its flight path, monitoring its speed and altitude and making all the necessary adjustments along its flight path to ensure that the plane flies safely. This takes off a significant workload off the pilot’s shoulders. Like the auto-pilot in the airplane, the web hosting provider’s experts take care of your server’s resources and monitor your server round the clock for any issues as they make the necessary updates and upgrades accordingly.
Managed VPS Hosting is mostly beneficial to non-technical customers who have little or no knowledge of setting up and configuring the server and its applications. Even more so, users who have little time on their hands to handle their VPS.
As the name suggests, in Unmanaged VPS Hosting the responsibility of managing the VPS is taken away from the provider and placed on the customer.
The customer is responsible for everything on the VPS. From the setting up of the server, configuration of applications to monitoring the VPS. The web hosting provider’s responsibility ends at providing network connection and the virtualization platform.  This is synonymous with the airplane’s auto-pilot being switched off and control handed back to the pilots. In effect, the pilots will be in full control of the plane. This is where the pilot’s training kicks in to guide the plane throughout its flight path and eventual safe landing. Â
Similarly, unmanaged VPS hosting requires a highly-skilled and tech-savvy individual with a decent amount of knowledge of how to configure and manage the VPS alongside other various services and applications that come with the VPS. The user has an unlimited degree of freedom to do as they please on the server.
On the other side of the coin, unmanaged VPS hosting is not recommended for beginners with limited technical knowledge as this will be a huge deterrent in their quest to getting things up and running. An ideal workaround for them would be the earlier discussed Managed VPS Hosting where the technical aspect is handled by the web hosting provider. Tech-savvy users will usually find this plan a walk in the park especially in setting up services like LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP), WordPress CMS and configuring features like SSL certificates, Firewall, CDN, site backups and DNS settings among many other aspects.
