How Small Businesses Reduce Operating cost using VPS

Well, here are some questions and set examples for you to understand it properly :

1.    How many unique visitors and page views does the server handle?

2.    How much work does the server do to serve each page?

With a static HTML site the answer to 2 is 'almost none', but a database powered CMS will be much more taxing on the server (depending on caching setup).

A Virtual Private Server is more about control and reliability in situations like this. In my experience shared hosting accounts may be up to the job at first, but six months down the line the server is slowed to a crawl. Submit ticket, get moved to new 'faster' server, repeat in another six months. If you are providing professional hosting, some would say a VPS is required in order to ensure a consistent level of performance for clients. In my experience they are also just faster period with heavyweight CMS sites because you can have access to more CPU and RAM.

Also, is it easy to manage? All sites I have built have been on a WYSWYG type website builder and shared hosting. I have used WordPress for blogging and helped design and get content on a few WordPress sites, but never a full HTML/CSS design. Is that something I will need to know with a VPS, or not?

HTML/CSS has got nothing to do with managing a VPS. You will need to know sysadmin stuff - get to grips with sshing into a linux command prompt (shell) and running commands. You will likely also need to understand things like how the Apache webserver (or whichever webserver you choose) works to a greater extent.

Some of this can be avoided by getting a VPS that comes with everything already installed and a control panel like cPanel set up (more expensive). With this set up it is actually not that much different to shared hosting that has cPanel running.

Here’s a piled up questions for you :

·         Do your clients upload files themselves?

·         Is it easier for you to use a web GUI or cli for things like user accounts, password changes, and How are you going to manage backups and changes?

·         Do the client sites use PHP and other stuff?

·         What are you doing for email -- are you providing the service through your shared hosting provider or are you not providing it?

I think if you go VPS that there will be periods where you spend 10+ hours per week managing them. But those will be few and far between as long as you stay on top of updates and backups.

The nice thing about VPS, especially with something like our Redswitches  is that you can keep snapshots in different parts of their infrastructure and bring back services quickly if one of their regions goes down. You're directly responsible for your uptime and another client can't really hose you that badly as long as the host isn't stupidly over committed. The plus is that you have control. The minus is that you have control.

Note : A single VPS could easily handle all of these sites together, but if it ever goes down, all your sites go down with it too, so what I suggest is getting another VPS with another provider in another country but close by to function as a manual hot standby. Have everything setup exactly the same (it can even be a disk clone) and when your main server goes down, restore the backup onto your hot spare and switch the DNS. (For your static sites you can even do DNS round robin for really great availability). There is nothing more satisfying than having a catastrophic disaster with one of your hosting providers and be online in 2 minutes.

But at http://redswitches.com/ , they got everything set for you, so that you don’t have to take further vps and other things.