VPS Web Hosting

A number of Wordpress blogs are crawling because they're hosted in oversold shared hosting webservers, so I'm looking for reliable VPS hosting.

Shared hosting is typically cheaper, so that explains why there are so many people placing their websites or blogs there. The problem is, Wordpress-powered blogs can be quite resource intensive (uses PHP and MySQL), and that can slow down the webserver.

And if your account happens to be on a server shared with someone else whose WP blog attracts a lot of readers, and whose WP plugins tend to slow down the main computer, then your own site will suffer also. That's why you might want to consider upgrading to a VPS or Virtual Private Server.

It's not a dedicated server, but a VPS is better than a shared host because there will be fewer people in that server. And fewer people means your site will be up longer than typical blogs hosted in overloaded shared servers.

I'm now looking at Slicehost and Linode, but the need to wade through lots of technical information about Linux can be quite daunting. Fortunately, there's a growing community of people who are learning Linux so that they can tweak their own VPS websites and have their WordPress blogs load faster.

This is a good move, particularly for WP blogs set-up as a membership model, because those sites will have login and password control, as well as selective content display (depending on the level of the member, say, gold or platinum).

Hopefully, this will be something worth trying, especially for my friends who have experienced slow loading pages or downtime at "popular" webhost providers.

[ First posted on 05/23/2009 by Manuel Viloria ]