difference between VPS and cloud server

VPS Vs Cloud Server: Which Hosting Should I Choose

It looks like a VPS and cloud server is very similar as you will get a certain and full management permission in your assigned space. However, to make sure which service is more suitable for your business, you need to know more difference between VPS and cloud. 

Basically, the difference is in their development and management ways. The price difference is also the key to affecting your choice. This article will describe some features, pros, and cons of VPS and cloud hosting.

What's the difference between VPS and the cloud?

A virtual private server is a virtual machine that is created by dividing a physical server (dedicated server) into small slices. Each slice/VPS can run in its own operating system environment. Let’s take a look at the typical differences in detail:

Scalability

Many people think VPS does not have scalability; relatively speaking, it does not as the mother physical server’s resource limited a VPS’ scalability. Partly says, when the physical server’s resource is enough, people can freely increase the storage, CPU, bandwidth, and memory if the current VPS resource does not match requirements. Downgrade or reduce resources can also be possible, but the steps are tedious.

A cloud server has more advantages in scalability as resources in a cloud are presented as a unified pool where you can scale them up or down at any moment. Based on multiple physical servers means a cloud server hosting can easily change its resource by a wide margin. Most important of all, there is no downtime for any downgrade or upgrade.

High availability

At this point of high availability, we can call the cloud server hosting as a winner due to its powerful redundancy. When a physical server is down, any cloud server hosted on it will not be affected. The cloud server can share the load of one server with other connected servers in the infrastructure.

Unfortunately, a VPS does not have the ability. When the hosted physical server is down, the VPS will be turned off immediately. If you or your hosting provider do not provide a backup service, there will be a risk of losing data. You can choose a provider which has an automatic backup service, such as Database Mart LLC.

Custom Infrastructure

Many VPS hosting providers will launch multiple VPS plans with different VPS resources. Additionally, you can choose from several operating systems, and add some extra resources, such as extra IPs, bandwidth, CPU, or memory on your VPS. But the configurations and OS are still limited by the provider’s settings.

Compared with a VPS, cloud hosting will let a client have more abundant choices. People can freely choose from hundreds of OS and app templates or create their own templates.

Price

Usually, with similar configurations, a cloud service will be more expensive than a VPS. Both services’ technologies are based on virtualization. But obviously, cloud services deployment and maintenance have higher complexity. That’s should be a reason for the high price of cloud services.

VPS works like a dedicated server with a defined configuration, so most of the providers use pre-paid charges. That means people pay in the monthly, semi-annually cycle, etc. However, as you can change a cloud server configuration easily, the “pay-as-you-go” model is welcomed for cloud service rental.

Why did I choose a VPS or cloud server?

Here we will list the benefits (9 benefits of running a business on VPS hosting) and disadvantages when you choose a VPS.

  • Data in each VPS is completely independent. Nobody else can access the data from other VPS.
  • Launch, reboot, and shut down your VPS independently from other users;
  • Own dedicated IP addresses, routing tables in a VPS, etc.
  • VPS support multiple users to access at the same time (you can enable single session mode if you do not need multiple users).

VPS is a good choice for small businesses or personal usage. For example, remote desktops, office apps related works, deploying small e-commerce projects, websites, and running as a specific function server (proxy, mail, monitoring, voice communication, etc.)

Unlike a shard hosting plan, VPS is an independent server to which you will have full administrator access. However, it is still easily affected by other VPS users in the same host server. Usually, a user cannot use its VPS resource up to 100%. Peak traffic loads of a hosting server will show the VPS’ performance down. So VPS does not suit for work that will occupy a lot of resources. In this situation, you need to choose a physical server (dedicated GPU, bare metal, SQL hosting server) or a cloud server.

Except for the price, cloud services have almost all the advantages of VPS’, and have the benefits that a VPS does not have. For example, choose specific resources at full liberty, instant provisioning, live scaling, high availability, handles enterprise traffic, pay as you use. That’s why a cloud server is a good choice for big projects with complex network topology, and high demands for security and scaling.

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