VPS or Virtual Private Server is a virtual machine that’s hosted somewhere in the world. A VPS provider divides a physical computer into multiple virtual computers and one can buy and access those virtual machines as a service. Each virtual machine runs its own operating system so you can perform any task without disturbing others on the same physical machine.
Why Should One Use VPS or Virtual Private Server?
Virtual private servers are obviously not for regular users who only like to enjoy thier favorite tracks or browse the internet. VPS are for people who need heavy system resources to perform their daily business activities without any problem of managing physical machines.
One can simply buy system resources from any Good VPS provider and set up his/her company environment. Because of the ongoing competition in the VPS industry, today we can setup a VPS as low as $2.5 a month. It’s enough if you want your blog or personal website to run on it.
VPS Costs
The cost depends on how much resources you need. As I mentioned above that one can setup vps in as low as $2.5 a month. And it’ll work just fine. But in that little price, you will only get 500MB RAM and 20GB SSD (storage). So now it is needless to say that the cost depends on how much resources you need. Most VPS service providers let you select the resources and then based on your need calculate the overall cost.
Here I am mentioning a few VPS providers and their basic plans just to give you an idea.
1. AWS (Amazon Web Services)
AWS, the most popular in the industry are the cloud services from Amazon. It works on pay-as-you-go approach. It charges for individual services. So as you stop a particular service, you stop paying for that. Visit AWS pricing page for more information.
2. Google Cloud Platform
The cloud services from the giant. Google Cloud Platform is what Google uses for its own services like Google Search and Youtube. It provides a host of modular cloud services including data storage, analytics, and machine learning etc.
Google provides a price calculator where you can select the service(s) to buy, other components and the tool will tell you the pricing.
To register for Google Cloud Platform, they ask for credit card or bank account details.
Here are more popular VPS providers that you can learn about –
3. Microsoft Azure 4. DigitalOcean 5. Vultr
How To Setup VPS?
One of the benefits of using VPS is that it takes minutes to set up and seconds to destroy. All you need is select the server location, select plan and hit deploy.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m using Vultr. It is the lowest price I can get. 🙂
After signing up, there is a dashboard where there is a plus sign button to deploy a server.
Now select the location of the server. Vultr currently provides 15 locations to deploy a VPS.
Select the operating system you want to install on the server. There are all major operating systems available including CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CoreOS, and Windows etc.
I’ve selected CentOS for this article.
Next, select the size or plan for the server.
Next, select additional features such as you can enable IPv6, Enable auto backups and enable DDOS protection etc. You can also set up a startup script which will run each time the server starts. If you don’t want to set up these features, then check the pricing and click deploy button.
As you hit deploy, the server will start installing. It’ll do partition, assign RAM and IP Address.
After the installation is finished, your server will be assigned a static IP Address.
And now your server is up and running. You can use SSH to connect and manage your server. The default user is root and password is ‘vultr created password’. As you can see the Bandwidth usage, CPU usage and current charges are also showing up.
So that’s it. This was the introduction to VPS. If you have anything to say about it, do not hesitate to tell me in the comment section below.
