Virtual private server (VPS)
What is a virtual private server (VPS)?
A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine on a hosting company’s physical server, with its own share of processor, memory and disk and its own operating system. Unlike shared hosting, you do not split one pool of resources with dozens of other sites, and you choose the software that runs. The price of that freedom is upkeep: someone has to patch, secure and watch the server.
Example
Take an online shop with around 6,000 products on shared hosting. On an ordinary day its pages open in under a second. On a campaign day traffic triples, and the scheduled stock import from the warehouse starts at the same hour. The host begins returning resource-limit errors, and the time to first byte (TTFB) on product pages jumps from 0.5 to 3 seconds — far above the 0.8 seconds Google recommends for a good TTFB.
Page caching and moving the import overnight remove much of the load, often without changing the host. If the peaks still choke the server, a VPS with its own processor and memory gives headroom a shared plan cannot. The reverse holds too: a VPS does not fix heavy images or slow database queries. It only gives them more room.
Why it matters for a business
A slow server answer shows on every page and on every ad click you pay for. The wrong choice costs in both directions: an overloaded shared plan loses orders at peak hours, and a VPS nobody administers goes without patches and backups until something breaks. Before changing the plan, measure where the time goes — the server or the site itself.
Shared hosting or a VPS
On shared hosting, many sites run on one server and split its processor, memory and disk within per-account limits. The host looks after the server; you get a control panel. For a company website, or a shop with lean code and working caching, that is usually enough, even with a few thousand products and steady traffic — the T&B platform is built to run on ordinary shared hosting, and moves to a VPS or a dedicated server when the numbers call for it. A VPS starts to make sense when:
- resource limits are hit every week, not once a year;
- heavy background jobs — imports, syncs, product feeds — get cut off halfway;
- you need software a shared plan will not allow, such as Redis or a separate search engine for the catalogue;
- a contract or a security requirement says the site must be kept apart from other people’s sites.
What to ask
- Is the VPS managed: who patches the operating system, who watches security and who runs the backups?
- How many processor cores and how much memory are reserved for us, and can they grow without a move?
- What does the TTFB measurement show before the switch and after it?
- What happens in an outage — who gets the alert, and how quickly is the site restored?
In website speed optimisation, hosting is one of four parts, alongside images, caching and code, and each is measured before and after the change.