VPS Hosting Perfect for Busy Online Shopping Periods

VPS hosting or Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a specialized form of web hosting encompassed under one of the hottest IT trends of the 21st Century know as cloud computing or cloud hosting.
IBM was the pioneer in an older technology called “time-sharing” which allowed programmers to somewhat cumbrously share resources on the same computer through multiple terminals or primitive workstations. This later evolved into a modern day version know as virtualization that has transformed server technology and web hosting in general.

Virtualization in a nutshell allows a company or web hosting company to consolidate several servers into one and assign ‘virtual machines’ to multiple end users thereby reducing physical hardware and software footprints. It also dramatically decreases the cost of operation for web hosting companies allowing them to pass these savings on to personal users, businesses and larger enterprises in the form of Virtual Private Servers or VPS instances made available over the Internet using a utility pricing model.
A VPS is thus an affordable, powerful and readily available platform to users or businesses that have outgrown the feature sets available in shared hosting platforms or for those who are not yet ready to administer more complex hardware and software environments present in a dedicated server.
Perhaps its most distinguishing and powerful feature is its ability to allow companies the ability to scale resources up or down, including RAM and disk space, at a moment’s notice depending on traffic levels. This feature is extremely important during busy shopping periods such as Christmas or Easter, when website visitors spike and e-commerce shopping carts are used excessively.
Previously, companies would have experienced issues if their platform were housed inside a shared hosting environment. For larger enterprises, they would need to overprovision dedicated servers for these scenarios which is costly, cumbersome and highly complex, placing undue pressure on short-staffed IT departments.
A VPS on the other hand, solves both issues, allowing an IT administrator to quickly purchase additional RAM or disk space to compensate for the increased traffic. In fact, this can often be done automatically in what is known as a ‘bursting’ environment.
A VPS hosting platform is thus a perfect platform for smaller to medium sized businesses that wish to scale ‘on-demand’ without having to invest heavily in onsite hardware and software.