VPS has grown to become one of the most useful pieces of modern online technology. It can be used for a variety of different things. It enables people with poor access to hardware to cheaply get their hands on better specs. It can enable forex traders to easily trade in all the active major trading sessions. And perhaps most importantly, it can be used as a server in its own right. VPS, used as a server, has all the qualifications that a normal server with legacy methods has, but it also enables the user to have greater control over their hosting process and specifications.
However, whenever you are hosting on the internet, chances are that the nature of the hosted data is sensitive. It could be your personal information or a business website. Either case, despite the fact that VPS has inherent advantages to hosting methods such as shared hosting, you will need to make sure that you are running your hosting on a credible VPS provider. No doubt, a VPS would serve you well, given you have a base-level understanding of how it works. So, a VPS is arguably the best option you have for hosting. There are four characteristics that showcase a safe and secure VPS hosting service. Cloudzy provides efficient Windows VPS for hosting operations and possesses all of these attributes, but if you want to go for another reliable provider, look out for these four key characteristics!
Isolated Environment
The critical advantage that a VPS offers you is signified in the second letter of the phrase “VPS,” which stands for private. This privacy, while inherent in almost all VPS hosting operations, needs to also be enforced physically on the server. A safe and secure VPS hosting service will have its virtual server partitioned and isolated from other virtual servers on the same physical piece of hardware. This, in turn, brings a number of major advantages to the user. Chances of performance overlap and overburdening the server becomes zero, as no user’s excessive hardware or bandwidth usage will be a problem for another user.
This isolation also has security advantages. Whereas in methods like shared hosting, your online safety is at the mercy of a severely exposed shared IP address which you will be sharing with other users on the same server, with an entirely isolated virtual server, you will also be getting a dedicated IP address that is exclusive to you only. This will eliminate the process of sharing data between you and other users and boost security significantly by removing any potential threat that could be posed to you by other shared users.
DDoS Protection
Data shows that among the different methods of online attacks, distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks is by far the most common. Therefore, many VPS providers have moved towards providing anti-DDoS protection to their users as part of their base paid plans. Now, there are still certain providers that either have not implemented these anti-DDoS measures or otherwise only give it out to their users as part of a paid plan. Given the commonality of DDoS attacks, any healthy and secure VPS hosting service should have anti-DDoS protocols implemented as part of its base plan.
DDoS is not only a single attacking method; there are several different methods, such as ping of death, slowloris, ICPM flood, UTP flood, SYN flood, HTTP flood, and NTP amplification. You need protection against all of these attacks if you want to see your website thrive and not be held for ransom by malicious online hackers. The bad news is that there are more and more zero-day DDoS attacks created each year by innovative hackers that employ new attacking protocols, so 100% safety is not guaranteed. But it’s better to have a semblance of protection, compared to none, especially in hosting.
Back Ups
A VPS service’s ability to provide backups showcases a vast infrastructure on the VPS provider’s part. Even with advanced protection against DDoS and other malicious attacks and malware, there’s a chance that a proficient enough hacker will be capable of damaging parts or all of your hosted material on the server. If such a case happens, the restoration of your hosted data rests entirely on the facility of backups provided by your VPS service. A good indicator of the quality of the provided backup is the interval with which backups are performed. For example, a daily backup routine is highly desired. This interval could extend to every three days or even a weekly process, but it should not go beyond a backup per week.
These backups are not only useful against successful online attacks. There are a lot of cases in which inexperienced users accidentally damage their own hosted operation, sometimes in an irreversible manner. Here again, backups are the only solution to bypass the issue at hand. So definitely look for the backup options of the VPS provider you are considering hosting in order to protect your data from any unforeseen scenarios.
Antivirus – Server Protection Software
Last but not least, we have third-party antivirus options. There are two different aspects to this criterion. First is the number and quality of pre-installed antivirus software that you are going to have on your VPS server, and secondly, the amount of liberty that your VPS provider is going to afford you in order for you to personally add additional protection software. Now, as far as pre-installed antivirus options go, it is unlikely to see programs such as McAfee preinstalled since antiviruses like this are not free and incur costs on the provider’s part. But still, you need to make sure that at least one antivirus program is provided on your VPS. Secondly, while VPS inherently comes with root access which enables you to install and uninstall programs as you please, many VPS providers take issue with you adding additional antivirus options since they may contradict the needed open ports for the VPS to properly work.
A safe and secure VPS host service will mediate between these two solutions and will have pre-installed options on the VPS to protect you as well as allow you to take charge of your own security by allowing you to install the antiviruses that you want.
Summary
Hosting a website, a media server, a gaming server, or workplace hosts is easily and safely done via the different VPS options available these days. However, even with the inherently high standards of the VPS technology, you would need to look out for your own safety. Do it with these four key characteristics!
