7 Reasons Why You Should Choose Unmanaged VPS Hosting

In the field of hosting, there are 2 main types of server plans - managed and unmanaged. This leaves some newcomers confused about the differences between the 2, making them uncertain about which type of hosting they should go for.

In reality it’s actually really simple - managed hosting involves the provider helping you manage and operate your server whereas unmanaged hosting means that you have complete control over your instance and that the provider doesn’t need to intervene when it comes to server management, opening up a field of possibilities and customization options, allowing you to run your server as you wish, reaching its full potential.

In this article, we'll explore 7 of the most compelling reasons why unmanaged VPS hosting is the perfect choice for businesses and individuals seeking ultimate control and customization over their online presence. From cost-effectiveness and scalability to performance optimization and security, unmanaged hosting offers a vast majority of advantages that can elevate your website and your online presence.

Unmanaged Hosting is Cost-Effective

Unmanaged hosting offers a significant advantage in terms of cost-effectiveness compared to managed hosting due to the simple fact that you don’t need to pay for any additional server management fees that usually come along with managed hosting plans.

These additional costs usually involve server maintenance, security updates, performance optimization and others. With unmanaged hosting, however, you have the ability to tailor your server to your needs as you see fit, meaning that you don’t need to invest into these additional fees, making this particular type a more budget-friendly solution.

And while it might seem quite daunting to try and manage everything by yourself, the savings that you can get by opting into it can be quite substantial, especially for those small businesses and individuals that are working on a tight budget. Additionally, you can invest these funds that you’d otherwise spend on a managed hosting plan into your marketing campaign or product development, meaning that you’d not only have more time for marketing but also the required budget for acquiring new customers.

Flexibility & Customization

One of the most significant advantages of unmanaged hosting is the unparalleled flexibility and customization that it offers. With managed hosting, you are quite often limited by the amount of resources that you have alongside the settings that are already made to your server, meaning that you can find yourself without having the option to use certain software as well as having to rely on the provider’s support team to make any small changes to your server, which can also result in extra charges.

With unmanaged hosting, you have the benefit of choosing your server type, hosting plan and resource allocation, making sure that you won’t be spending more than you budget, but also ensuring that you will get the most optimal performance at all times from your server.

Additionally, you also get to choose your operating system, install extra software and make changes in order to accommodate your style of work and your website or application so that it can be easy for you to operate your instance.

All of these aforementioned aspects involve choosing the number of CPUs, RAM, and storage capacity for your hosting plan, the operating system and its distribution and the version that you’d like or that you’re more comfortable using.

These flexibility and customization options will allow you to create the perfect hosting environment not only for you but also for your business or brand, especially if you intend to run an e-commerce platform or a data-intensive application.

Full & Direct Control

The next defining feature of unmanaged hosting is the ability to get full control over your entire hosting environment. While managed hosting limits your ability to make changes to your server, unmanaged hosting gives you ultimate power with complete root access and administrative privileges, allowing you to make any changes necessary to your server.

This means that you have the ability to modify system files, install software, optimize your server’s performance and also manage users and their access. Not only that but you also get the option to tweak and configure network settings, assign security policies and monitor your server’s performance and allocate resources where they are needed and get additional CPU, RAM or storage if needed. This also brings us to the next feature of unmanaged hosting - scalability.

Scalability

As we already mentioned, unmanaged hosting is quite flexible. This also applies to the ability of this hosting type to scale your server’s resources as needed, offering both vertical and horizontal scaling.

With vertical scaling, you can increase the resources allocated to your server by getting extra CPU cores, RAM or storage. This is usually a perfect option for those users that need to handle a temporary spike in traffic in order to meet their visitors’ or customers’ demands. In other words, it’s great for seasonal businesses or websites that have greater influxes of traffic throughout a specific time of the year.

Horizontal scaling, on the other hand, involves adding additional servers to your infrastructure to distribute the workload, which is a better option for larger businesses and websites that require redundancy and fault tolerance with zero downtime without having to sacrifice performance.

The ability to scale your resources up or down as needed provides you with the flexibility to adapt to changing business conditions. Whether you're experiencing rapid growth, seasonal fluctuations, or unexpected surges in traffic, unmanaged hosting allows you to scale your infrastructure to meet the demands of your business.

Performance & Optimization

Next up, unmanaged VPS hosting also offers the ability to optimize the server performance to meet your specific needs. With complete control over your server, you can implement various techniques to improve speed, responsiveness and overall user experience, which is crucial if you want to rank well with different search engines. Here are a few examples of how you can manually optimize your VPS!

Firstly, you should think about implementing a caching mechanism. This is a great way to significantly improve your website or app’s performance as it stores accessed data locally on the user’s machine, avoiding the need to have to retrieve the data from the server every time.

Secondly, you should also think about data compression. This can save you quite some time when sending data to the user’s machine, ultimately reducing bandwidth usage and resulting in a faster load time.

Thirdly, you could also have a think about your database and how you could potentially optimize it by making changes to your database schema, indexes and queries so that everything is returned and stored much faster.

Finally, you should also do some research on Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) as they help distribute your website’s content across multiple servers throughout the entire world, meaning that your website will load faster regardless of the user’s geographical location. This will also help bring down latency, which will make your website load faster.

Best For Developers & Advanced Users

Even though anyone could employ unmanaged VPS servers for their project, they are usually best fitted for developers and slightly more advanced users due to all of the customization options, tools and direct root access that the hosting type provides. Unmanaged servers allow developers to easily install their preferred programming languages, tools and frameworks, which consequently enables them to try out new technologies and create new and exciting projects by still having complete control over their projects’ architecture, codebase and development process.

Additionally, this makes them a great option for resource-intensive websites and applications that require a substantial amount of computing resources like e-commerce platforms, video streaming services or data-reliant applications like AI algorithms and machine learning.

This is especially due to the fact that VPS servers are quite powerful in nature, combining cost-effectiveness with high performance. This will not only result in a website or application that loads fast, but also in a website that works in a smooth way.

Security & Control

This next feature is quite controversial in nature as unmanaged hosting puts all of the pressure of maintaining server’s security on the user’s shoulders. While some might say that this is quite the significant drawback for inexperienced users, it’s actually a blessing in disguise once you learn how to keep your VPS safe, due to the fact that you have complete control over any security measures that you wish to implement. This is because sometimes managed hosting fails to deliver a robust way of protecting your server as there are a vast majority of threats that can be particularly aimed at your project and the technologies that you use.

Here are a few ways which you can utilize in order to protect your server:

• Make sure to update your operating system, software and any applications that you use

• Only use strong and unique passwords for all administrative accounts and services.

• Ensure that you configure your firewall in order to restrict access to your server from unauthorized sources.

• Consider utilizing a backup strategy like server snapshots or backups to protect your server.

• Utilize security monitoring tools which can alert you when a problem arises.

Even though unmanaged hosting security can be quite difficult to set up for beginners, the benefits that you get by setting up defenses manually will make sure to protect your server from a wider range of threats without you having to rely on any third-party software, which could potentially lead to data leaks.

Managed vs Unmanaged VPS Hosting

The leading difference between the 2 hosting types is the level of control that you will have over your server. Managed hosting is a more hands-off approach, relying on the provider and the features that they have developed, whereas unmanaged hosting gives you complete control over your server, allowing you to manage it as you like.

Managed hosting is usually a much better choice for those without much technical experience and those who don’t want to invest much initially into their server. Unmanaged hosting, on the other hand, is a fantastic option for those that want to fully customize their server, its resources and its functionalities.

Can Unmanaged Hosting come with Support?

Do you want to have the flexibility of your unmanaged VPS hosting plan, but still want to have server support at your fingertips? While most unmanaged plans don’t come with exclusive extra support, we at VPSBG do offer our very own support plans that you can easily take advantage of! But why is having server support so valuable even if you are going to utilize an unmanaged hosting plan?

Firstly, this can minimize downtime significantly. If you don’t happen to notice that there is an issue with your server, the support team can immediately detect and start working on fixing it.

Secondly, a support team will also make sure that you are getting consistent performance at all times by optimizing the configuration and preventing bottlenecks that can negatively impact your website’s load speed.

Thirdly, they will also employ additional security measures for your server and proactively protect it from hackers and unauthorized access.

Finally, you will also get help with software installations and overall server management, taking care of everything for you while you can focus on other important things like marketing and developing new features.

Our Support Plans

Our support plans come in different tiers, each having its own set of features, allowing you to choose the best support plan for your needs. Whether you want to have just basic support or you are looking for one of the more advanced plans, we’ve got you covered!

Basic Plan

Our basic plan is for people, who already have some expertise or their own technical team that is capable of fixing any issues that may come up in their setup. With this plan, you get our powerful and reliable infrastructure with a fast network. You also get a speedy reaction to infrastructure problems, however, everything beyond our SLA, or complex issues other than simple tasks, alongside support tips implementations are not included.

Professional Plan

Our professional plan is perfect for small and non-mission critical operations. It is designed for those users that rarely need support for complex issues. This support plan will help you take the hassle out of some tasks and save you time by having our support team handle some requests and simple system administration tasks. It is a good option for online stores and apps that are more business-intensive.

Premium Plan

Our premium plan is ideal for business owners that require more immediate incident reaction times as well as for those that have more time-sensitive applications that need greater attention and collaboration with our support. This plan also comes with extra tips on security, stability and a backup strategy that are all a must for websites and applications.

Enterprise Plan

With our enterprise plan you get a personal, custom and highly-experienced support team at your disposal that is capable of managing, developing and maintaining your cloud infrastructure. Ideal for larger corporations, businesses and teams that are looking to have constant monitoring and support at their fingertips in addition to development and automation.