corsayoung
Member
Registered: 10th Feb 09
Location: Cheltenham
User status: Offline
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Currently running a web forum, getting a fair size and through time i know i will prob need to go off shared hosting.
Came across VPS's a few years ago, never used one but always interested me, whats the advantages of them? Disadvantages? Do they come with cpanel, plesk etc or is that a license fee ontop...
Easy to setup websites etc and transfer.. any help would be grannddd
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willay
Moderator
Organiser: South East, National Events
Premium Member
Registered: 10th Nov 02
Location: Roydon, Essex
User status: Offline
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Advantages are full system access, possibly have more system resources to run your services.
Disadvantages are it will need setting up from the ground up, you'll get a login to a operating system and unless you know what you are doing with said operating system it might be quite taxing. You'll have to install software for the webserver, the forum, database etc and configure it.
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ed
Member
Registered: 10th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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My VPS came setup with Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Was ready to go and has a licenced copy of Plesk. For basic stuff if was up and ready to go, but with it being a VPS I was able to add on useful stuff like FFMpeg and some other PHP type bits  This was with Web Fusion.
Perhaps you could look at Rackspace Cloud Hosting or Amazon EC2 as it would work out cheaper for low volume stuff and would be easily expandable if needs be. Would take more setting up however.
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ed
Member
Registered: 10th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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Actually - Rackspace Cloud Hosting looks like it works in a traditional hosting sense, where as Amazon is needs a bit more work to get running.
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Dom
Member
Registered: 13th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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VPS/VDS is just a virtualised server that sits on top of physical server; your instance shares a percentage of the hardware amongst other instances. But it does mean you'll have full control of the virtual server as you would with a dedicated box but without the cost.
You also have a few variants of virtualisation (this is linux) as well - KVM/XEN(/VMware as well i think?) and OpenVZ.
And like a dedicated box, each VDS/VPS package will have different CPU/RAM limits (they might be 'burstable') on top of the usual storage/bandwidth limits.
Then with most hosting packages you have Managed servers and Un-managed servers. With managed your host will deal with setup, installing packages/updates, backups (usually you'll have SSH access but not ROOT access) but tends to cost more; Un-managed, you have to sort it (usually you'll have ROOT access) but works out cheaper.
As for setup after purchase, sometimes it'll come with an OS (you might have the option to select OS) pre-installed and it might be setup for LAMP. Or as Willay said, sometimes you have to go about configuring the instance from scratch (usually via the hosts control panel) and SSH in and install packages/updates/LAMP etc.
And control panels, like cPanel, tend to be a monthly add-on but on a managed VPS box it'd present itself like any other cPanel hosting package except you'd have SSH access.
I'd have a look on the http://www.webhostingtalk.com forums, plenty of information of there plus offers from hosts. Although from personal experience www.tsohost.com and www.vidahost.com offer decent spec'd VDS/VPS boxes for reasonable prices.
Edit - Thought about Cloud hosting? Unless you need SSH/Root access, cloud based hosting might be a better bet. Again i'd look at TSOHost as they have a pretty decent cloud-based setup and it's reasonably priced.
[Edited on 05-01-2012 by Dom]
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