Cloud Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are available in many different flavors, and the service providers offer an abundance of plans for customers to choose from when deploying a server.

When requisitioning a VPS, you are in control of choosing the operating system, usually Windows or a Linux distribution, and you can also opt for a pre-imaged auto-deployed application server, such as WordPress, cPanel, Docker or NodeJS.

Importantly, you also get to choose the performance of the Cloud VPS you are creating; this is done by selecting a VPS Plan that suits your needs.

VPS Hosting Models & Plans

A Cloud VPS offers the perfect blend between a traditional VPS and dedicated hosting, which has made it an extremely popular service offering for the service providers and hosting companies. With a Cloud VPS, not only do you benefit greatly from the cost savings associated with the legacy hosting platforms, but you also get the guaranteed CPU, disk, and memory resources from a dedicated cloud platform.

This is why a growing number of organizations are migrating private, personal, and business workloads to Cloud VPS. Atlantic.Net’s sales and support teams are often asked, “What plan should I choose? Do I need all this CPU power? Do I need extra memory (RAM)?” IT Professionals and System administrators will be able to answer these questions, but not everyone is a computer expert. For this reason, we have put together this guide to offer you the background knowledge you need to make an informed decision on what plan best suits your requirements.

What Is a Cloud VPS Plan?

Most service providers offer Cloud VPS under a variety of available plans. These plans typically include a General Purpose collection of standardized servers which are designed and suitable for multiple roles. Plans are also available for I/O intensive applications; these are Storage Optimized servers whose main benefit is disk performance. Providers also offer plans for Memory-Optimized or Compute-Optimized workloads.

Cloud VPS plans allow you to choose a server that will provide the specified resources detailed above, guaranteed. A VPS is a virtual machine that is hosted on a virtual hypervisor. Virtual hypervisor technology allows the VPS to be deployed automatically, using pre-defined build scripts. The VPS is then built and allocated to a physical host that has the resources specified in the plan.

The selected plan will include the preferred number of vCPUs available on the VPS. One vCPU is a single-core, while 8 vCPUs are 8 cores. The host will allocate CPU reservations against the physical hosts CPU sockets, cores and threads.

The physical hosts will have huge allocations of superfast memory (RAM), and this physical memory is logically divided up between the VPS guests. If you select a plan with 4GB RAM, your VPS is reserved 4GB of physical RAM from the stack. Your VPS will have exclusive access to that 4GB of allocated memory.

VPS plans also include a multitude of disk storage options. Not only do these options include the size of storage allocated to the VPS, but also the type and speed. Storage allocations can be super fast Solid State Disk (SSD) storage, advanced premium (High I/O) dedicated local SSD storage, or extensive, flexible, and robust Secure Block Storage (SBS).

The VPS network bandwidth allocated by the cloud provider must be taken into consideration when setting up a VPS. All inbound (ingress) network traffic to a VPS is usually free, but outbound (egress) network traffic is chargeable. Your customers will use egress network allocations to access data on your server, for example, when accessing your website. Most VPS plans will include a set amount of “free” network bandwidth. This might be a small amount or a substantial allocation; the best option for you depends purely on your usage expectations.

Plan Flexibility

You can always upgrade your Cloud VPS plan at any time. This adds a lot of flexibility; as your business grows organically, so can your VPS. Essentially, you can re-provision the server with more CPU, disk, memory and network bandwidth. There are a few “gotchas” with this technology; commonly, the operating system will need to be re-imaged when upgrading your VPS. But if you have planned your VPS design, you can save your data on an SBS volume, or if you have a backup or snapshot, you can simply move the data volume onto the new server.

Backup restoration is a much simpler way of restoring data to a newly reprovisioned server. Simply restore your system over the top of your new server from backup. This approach gets you back up and running in next to no time. A VPS can scale up by reprovisioning to a new plan with better performance, but the VPS can also scale out meaning that you can implement a cluster of virtual private servers to work together to provide additional compute resources.

General Purpose VPS

General-purpose VPS plans are the most commonly used and deployed. These types of VPS are for general, everyday workloads. The use case scenario for a general-purpose VPS varies massively; for example, you might provision this type of plan to host a website or a workstation.

Just because these servers are labeled general purpose does not mean that they are slow or underperforming. Our SSD-backed servers are ultra-fast, no matter what resources you allocate. You can purchase a VPS for as little as $10 per month, and you might be surprised how powerful the smallest plan works out. If using Linux, the servers are more than powerful enough to run WordPress, cPanel, and basic MySQL applications.

The general purpose plan goes up to 64GB RAM, 20vCPU and 650GB SSD. These kinds of resources are powerful enough for enterprise-grade Docker installations, backup servers, or even powerful SQL database servers.

Storage Optimized VPS

A VPS optimized for storage does exactly as the name suggests; you not only have access to dedicated, high-performance professional SSD hardware, but also can allocate up to 4TB of SSD storage to your VPS.

For obvious reasons, we do not recommend running just Windows Server on a 4TB SSD; these storage optimized servers are recommended for I/O intensive applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and, in particular, SQL ETL data transformation jobs. The super-fast I/O gives the VPS the capability to crunch huge amounts of data in no time at all.

Storage Optimized VPS use local SSD drives and are great for ultra-low latency, mission-critical tasks. Most commonly, our customers use these servers for distributed databases and data analytics.

Memory-Optimized VPS

Customers that need servers with a large amount of volatile memory (RAM) can opt for the Memory Optimized VPS, which offers not only the best prices for higher RAM amounts, but also large amounts of uninterrupted memory sizes ranging from 16GB to 128GB.

These are designed for applications that require extremely high memory I/O or use applications that reside in memory for better performance. This type of VPS suits database applications and programs like Apache Spark.

Each server uses SSDs which enhance the performance of memory-optimized servers, and the SSDs can be used to dump data in the event of an error.

Compute-Optimized VPS

An Optimized CPU VPS will provide your applications with a huge amount of compute power. With this type of VPS, you have access to the optimized Intel CPU hosting platform, allowing users to process vast amounts of information instantaneously.

CPU optimized VPSes are perfect for data analytics, video processing, gaming servers, and Docker worker nodes. SSD storage and ultra-fast memory create a server package that can keep up with the biggest of workloads.

What Next?

Clearly the array of choices for a VPS is vast, and there are many use cases for each type of VPS. Usually, customers opt for plans with lower specifications, knowing that they can upgrade the plan if and when an upgrade is needed.

Cloud VPS offers greater levels of control over your server. Our hosting environment is simple to use, but powerful and flexible. Most importantly, your resources are guaranteed without disruption.

Share your vision with us and we will develop a hosting environment tailored to your needs!

Contact an advisor at 888-618-DATA (3282) or get started on our VPS Hosting page.