VPS or Cloud? How can VPS service providers offer better services to their customers?

With the shift in technology that prioritises remote management, there is a strong emphasis being given to scalable services.  Virtualisation has become a key consideration for businesses that prioritise efficient utilisation of resources. VPS (Virtual Private Server) has gained popularity for this very reason and many businesses made a switch from dedicated servers on premises to VPS which allows them to access virtual resources more efficiently. However, can VPS service providers offer more to their customers in terms of resource access, usage and automation? In this post, let’s explore the differences between VPS and cloud services and how VPS providers can exemplify their offerings to include cloud services.

Under what scenarios do businesses prefer VPS?

For a long time, VPS has been widely accepted as an advanced form of dedicated hosting solutions. Businesses see a lot of benefit in moving to a virtual private server rather than investing in hardware. Some of the reasons why VPS is appealing to businesses are:

– Complete freedom to manage the server.

– Full access to install any required software

– Unlike shared hosting, VPS offers efficiency as you have your own resources

– Isolation from other servers.

– Enhanced security as files cannot be accessed by any other clients.

However, one of the major disadvantages of VPS hosting is that in case a server is down, the application that is hosted will be unavailable with no redundancy available. This is why many businesses are preferring a switch to public clouds.

Cloud Services – what’s the difference and how is it a better offering than VPS?

If you are a VPS service provider, you would have seen a shift in preferences in the past few years – customers prefer highly accessible and highly available hosting options. Cloud is the next step towards offering such services. Many of the VPS hosting providers too have switched to offering public cloud hosting. With cloud services, they can offer customers lower downtimes and a secure and reliable infrastructure as a service to run their critical workloads.

With cloud hosting services, you can offer your customers with:

– Virtual partitions on multiple physical networks

– Automated failovers to avoid downtimes

– Highly secure access via a cloud management platform

– Extensible, flexible and scalable resources

– Real time availability of resources on demand.

– Pay-as-you-go model makes it more economical and appealing to subscribers.

Why should VPS service providers switch to Cloud Hosting?

For many, VPS hosting has worked just fine – for very long. However, it has a number of management overheads that can be easily avoided with cloud. VPS hosting allocates a specified amount of computing resources to each client. If the requirement increases and the system is not able to handle the additional inflow, it crashes. Similarly, if a system malfunctions, it is unable to offer the services. Managing each customer’s servers and maintaining downtimes to a minimum without disrupting their services is an operational overhead.

Also Read – The Rise of Cloud Repatriation: Balancing Cost and Performance in the Cloud Landscape

With cloud hosting services on the other hand, you can build your infrastructure to tackle the increase in demand for resources differently. Under the cloud environment, the website is hosted on a pool of unified computing resources. This means that if one server reaches its optimum level, then a second server is ready to function. Similarly, if a server fails, the services running on them from a subscriber perspective will be unaffected as other servers will continue to serve the incoming traffic. By switching to providing full-fledged cloud service, you can offer reliability and powerful functionality to your customers. Customers get an unlimited supply of resources which they can configure by themselves and release them once they are done using it. Since these computing resources are pooled in from multiple physical servers, you can efficiently cater to the demands of businesses.

Who uses VPS hosting and who would prefer to switch to cloud?

Many businesses have switched from VPS hosting to cloud. VPS is made for those who are interested in hosting a single website or single service with no significant growth in the future. While VPS is powerful, it does not guarantee uptime and hence cloud is a more reliable option that businesses are looking at. Small and medium sized businesses who have a fixed IT requirement may be more comfortable with a VPS service, however, those businesses who wish to scale soon and expect their IT infrastructure and resources to dynamically scale too would prefer a cloud setup.

Here is a comparison that shows the differences in VPS and cloud hosting and how VPS service providers can better their offerings by switching to cloud hosting:

Differences in both the infrastructures:

	VPS Hosting	Cloud Hosting
Server Deployment and Management	Yes	Yes
Server Sharing Model	Private Server	Dedicated Cloud Server
Scalability (auto/manual)	Yes	Yes
Platform-as-a-Service offering	No	Yes
Containerisation	No	Yes
DB-as-a-Service	No	Yes
Low Cost	Yes	Yes
Pay As You Go	Yes	Yes
Customization	Yes	Yes
Security	Yes	Yes
Instant Provisioning	No	Yes (in managed hosting)
Performance	Depends on the vendor	Fast
Reliability	Yes	Yes
Multiple Data Centers	Depends on the vendor	Yes

Why Does Cloud Hosting Stand Out as the Best Hosting Solution?

For those offering VPS hosting services, the next best step is switching to providing a full-fledged cloud solution. With cloud hosting you can promise customers a more stable and reliable infrastructure that can be scaled as per requirements. When deployed with an appropriate cloud management platform, your customers can add/remove resources as needed within a few clicks. These resources can be dismissed when no longer needed – without financial losses. It is dynamically scalable and customisable. Here’s why cloud hosting could be a better hosting solution for your customers:

Better performance

VPS limits offerings and can promise only a fixed level of performance. This is because only a set level of system resources are dedicated to individual virtual servers. If there is a high demand of resources on the server, it will lead to the failure of the virtual server. With cloud, you can set up redundancy and ensure failovers to offer a better performance level to your subscribers.

Customization

In cloud hosting, you have the provision of installing various sorts of applications. In the case of customisation in VPS, the functioning is the same as the dedicated server, the user gets full root access and has complete control over the operating system. But it is a physical host system and can run only one OS. So, the choice of operating system will be limited as it depends on the provider.

Low cost

VPS servers are an expensive offering. Businesses today prefer a pay-as-you-go model to control costs. With a cloud offering, you can capture the market better.

How can IndiQus help?

IndiQus has been working with VPS service providers to design and deploy public cloud services. Leveraging from their existing technology infrastructure, the entire process is simplified. We set up the virtualisation and orchestration layer, topped with our comprehensive cloud management platform – apiculus. This platform offers a combination of operational functions as well as business functions to enable you to manage not only the resources, but also billing, invoicing and self-service and ticketing etc. Equipped with the right tools, VPS providers can conveniently switch to offering a complete public cloud solution to their customers.

If you are a VPS provider and wish to understand more about how to convert your existing setup to a cloud-based offering, do reach out to us. Our cloud experts will be happy to discuss your requirements!