Are you sick and tired of the slow, unreliable performance provided by your shared web hosting account? Are you ready for hosting that offers more features and the freedom to use it however you'd like? If you answered "yes" to either of these questions, then a Virtual Private Server (VPS) may be for you. A Windows Hosting VPS, for instance, provides a much better quality hosting experience for a relatively modest increase in price. Especially when compared to expensive dedicated hosting solutions, a VPS is often a tremendous bargain. It is the ideal choice for those people who need more bandwidth and flexibility than shared hosting offers but who aren't quite ready for their own stand-alone server.
On a shared web server, there are no clear boundaries between your files and those of other account holders. Depending on the level of server activity at a given time, your site may load very quickly or very, very slowly. Bandwidth and system resources are shared between all users. This is why shared hosting is okay for small, personal sites but inappropriate for important, mission critical applications: performance is unreliable and you can't ever be sure how much traffic your site will be able to handle. Virtual Private Servers, on the other hand, "split the difference" between shared hosting and a stand-alone, dedicated server. While a VPS still makes use of shared physical resources, each account is logically separate from whatever else is happening on that machine. This occurs at the software level and is almost always hidden from the VPS owner. So, with a Windows Hosting VPS, for example, it is as if you have your very own private Windows Server box, complete with its own bandwidth, memory, and every other resource you'd expect.
Although virtual private servers unequivocally have a great deal to offer, they're not for everyone. Whether or not a VPS is the ideal solution to your web hosting needs is dependent on your individual requirements, priorities, and budget. Even so, a virtual server has a number of key advantages that nearly everyone should consider:
While a few other obscure operating systems exist out there, the vast majority of virtual private servers are running either Linux or Windows Server. While Linux is currently the most popular choice, thanks largely to its no-cost price point, ease of customization, and great support community, Windows Server has some significant advantages. Primarily, what sets it apart are Microsoft's numerous proprietary extensions and web development tools, which only work on Windows. These include: