6 tips to Secure and Optimize your Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Sean Jones
4 min readMar 28, 2018

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Having a Virtual Private Server hosting is very liberating, it gives you greater control, more efficiency, a good sense of security, gives you a lot of liberty to experiment with your configurations all by yourself, and Virtual private service provider often assist you with every minute detail that might be useful in maintaining your hosting. If you are using a VPS, serve you’ll relate to what I’m saying. A Virtual Private server hosting is a type of web hosting that you may use to run your business.

A Private virtual server is a physical partition of a server. These partitions in the server form fully functional mini servers. It is called as a mini server because the miniature server doesn’t have to depend on the original server for any resources. It is entirely equipped with all the resources, all the technical power, CPU, RAM, and storage.

When you opt for a VPS server, you get a mini server where you can launch your website. It is as good as having a dedicated server. It functions for you. You get your own CPU, RAM, storage space, bandwidth and operational space. It operates independently in isolation from other websites hosted on different mini servers.

VPS hosting offers you everything that you need out of hosting. When something provides you everything that you need, people start taking it for granted assuming it will work efficiently on its own and that is where the problem begins. Similarly, with a VPS hosting, you will not get all the features of the VPS system unless you try to optimize them.

Knowing your server and optimizing it time to time is essential to gain the comprehensive benefits of the VPS hosting. This is a fact which holds true in every sense. Be it Harrisburg Web hosting, or Central PA Web hosting; you have to optimize your hosting for better gains. Here are the tips to secure and optimize your Virtual Private Server:

1. Identify your resources:

Before choosing the web hosting plan, you need to analyze your requirements carefully. The requirements about your daily traffic, your storage requirements, all that you need. When you know all these things beforehand, you can quickly narrow down to one plan offered by various Virtual private service providers and choose the one with the lowest cost.

If you do not do this, you might fall prey to the lucrative plans which give you massive resource which you might never need.

2. Go for managed VPS:

A VPS hosting gives you excellent control over the configurations and the platforms of your VPS. It instills a lot of power in your hands for handling the resources. But if you are not a technical person, you might face some issues managing the back end and the technical part of the VPS hosting.

You can always opt for a managed VPS system. A managed VPS gives you full support from the VPS providers end, and you can work in other areas of your business and keep your head free.

3. Use the VPS which compliments your system:

There are various VPS hosting options: Linux VPS, Windows VPS, and cloud-based VPS. If you have all your system in Windows, it advisable to go for the Windows-based VPS system. If your system is scattered among different platforms, you need to go for a Linux VPS hosting.

It all depends on your choice and what is right for you. With the most suitable system, you will optimize your VPS performance.

4. Track daily activities:

Having increased traffic on your website is always good news. But if you don’t have an infrastructure to manage it, then it is not good news. Your website might even crash if you cannot handle all the traffic.

You need to keep track of the daily activities. You can even draw a threshold of the number of visitors on your site which you can handle, if the website shows increasing trends of visitors, you can extend your resources and always be prepared to handle more traffic.

5. Run security checks:

Although the VPS is the most secure hosting by far, there is no harm in keeping a close vigilance on the security. You can always have an additional firewall or a security layer to ensure that your website is secure because you do not want to have a website which is prone to any malware or is vulnerable to any attack.

6. Optimize your resources:

The rule is simple, if you pay for it, use it. Keep on checking if you have any resources that are underused. Always try to utilize everything that you have till exhausted.

You can ask for the reduction of that resource from your plan and save your money if that resource has consistently not been utilized for an extended period.

VPS provides a lot of incredible features. You can use everything efficiently by optimizing the use of your VPS hosting!

Originally published at digitology.kinja.com on March 28, 2018.

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