[This is a sponsored review for VPS.net]
We’ve pretty much all realized at this point that cloud hosting is where it’s at for a lot of things. Basically, if your site has outgrown shared hosting, then cloud hosting is definitely something you should be looking at.
There are a number of advantages over traditional virtual private servers or dedicated servers.
First among those advantages is the ability to scale as needed. This can be a huge plus for a lot of sites that are growing quickly and would prefer not to have downtime when an upgrade is needed.
The catch is that not all cloud hosts are created equal. There are plenty of “cloud” hosts out there that offer little benefit over traditional VPS or dedicated servers (and some that even provide little benefit over shared hosting).
VPS.net offers everything you’d expect in a cloud host with the added benefit of 15 locations around the world, and they’re expanding all the time. Most of your visitors coming from Japan? Then why not locate your server there? Or maybe they’re coming from Canada? Or England? Or Singapore, the USA, or somewhere in continental Europe? Maybe your visitors are coming from all over the world. It doesn’t matter; VPS.net probably has a server close by.
Pick servers close to where your visitors are coming from so that your sites load faster and are less affected by network issues.
VPS.net has a ton of other great features, too. Their entire infrastructure is cloud-based, with “self-healing” servers for their cloud hosting. That means if a server goes down, it drops out of the cloud immediately and your site automatically comes back up within seconds on a new server. No more hours (or even minutes) of outages, costing you or your clients money.
Their cloud servers can scale with demand too, without reboot. The VPS.net “cloud brain” dynamically assigns RAM and CPU as your cloud server needs it, virtually eliminating slow sites and downtime.
Their servers are faster, too. They use enterprise-level RAID 10 arrays, so they’re faster and more reliable, and optional Snapshot, rsync, and R1soft backups can be integrated with each server.
Their comprehensive API gives you access for everything from adding FTP accounts to submitting tickets to managing DNS. And their development team will even help you implement their API into your business.
Need to hire someone to manage your cloud server for you? VPS.net has you covered with server management packages that start at $10/incident or $99.95/month. That way you’re covered without having to spend thousands on a dedicated, experienced server administrator.
VPS.net can also cover any of your software needs. They offer more than 100 different operating systems, all of which can be deployed in minutes with a single click. And they make installing apps a breeze, with 150 open source applications available to be set up in less than 15 minutes using their intuitive control panel. Apps include WordPress, Drupal, MediaQiki, Magento, and more.
And of course you’ll get full server control. Whether you need root access or cPanel, they’ve got you covered. And each server comes with a full GUI that gives you complete access, as if you were sitting right in the datacenter.
Ready to sign up? Within ten minutes your new cloud server will be up and running. Flexible plans start at just $20/month, which gets you 0.6GHz dedicated CPU, 376MB dedicated RAM, 10GB of disk space, and 1TB network transfer. Need more? For less than $100/month (or $7/day), you can get 4.2GHz dedicated CPU, 2632MB dedicated RAM, 70GB of disk space, and 7TB network transfer. There are plenty of plans in between too, so you’re not paying for power and capacity you don’t need. And there are even more powerful plans, ranging all the way up to one with 7.2GHz dedicated CPU, 4512MB dedicated RAM, 120GB of disk space, and 12TB network transfer for just $12/day ($168/month).
You can also select your server based on software, with packages that are optimized for the software you want to run, including Ruby on Rails, Asterisk, OpenVPN, Magento, and WordPress.
The VPS.net management team conducts frequent townhall-style webinars to communicate with their customers, and there’s an open comment box available all the time. No long term contracts are required and you can cancel whenever you want for any reason.
Regardless of your hosting needs, VPS.net’s cloud hosting and cloud servers are a great option. Be sure to check them out!
[Disclaimer: This post is a sponsored review, the opinions expressed in the article are the author’s only.]