Why does a business need VDS? Cloud boost for startups and small businesses

The days of huge filing cabinets, sending and receiving paper letters, and metric tons of printed office documents for processing and storing information are over. In the modern world, they have successfully been replaced by much more efficient, flexible, and scalable digital tools, with one of the most popular and rapidly developing ones being cloud servers and infrastructure. According to Gartner, demand for them began long before COVID-19, increased during the epidemic, and continues to grow now.

Cloud servers have expanded business capabilities – virtualization has become more accessible and convenient for users. Functionality has expanded, for example:

• Remotely connected databases that allow for fundamentally new forms of analytics, finding weak points in processes and increasing work efficiency, as well as keeping more accurate records of goods,
• Web and application hosting that connects companies with clients around the world,
• AI,  bringing a new level of efficiency and speed to work in many areas. For example, by combining it with Big Data, you can predict future business development while taking into account internal and external factors.

However, cloud servers are a rather broad category that includes a lot of choices. So, let’s begin to get to grips with it.

One can say that the smallest and least stable element of the lot is shared hosting and VPS (Virtual Private Servers). This is due to several factors:

• All resources (CPU, RAM, storage) are divided between users of one physical server. Resource distribution is often not guaranteed, which means that if one user has taken up most of the resources, then others are left with less than what was advertised.
• The level of isolation between users is usually lower than with other types of cloud servers, and the performance of one VPS can affect others.
• Performance can vary depending on the load coming from other users on the same physical server.
• The level of customization can be limited depending on the shared environment.

Due to the above, we will not dwell on this type of server. Let's move on to a more stable and reliable level of cloud technologies – this is VDS or Virtual Dedicated Server. In this article, we will analyze how it can be useful for business, especially startups. Let's start with the concept and general characteristic advantages.

What is VDS

VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) is a virtualization technology that allows for the division of one physical server into several virtual ones using specialized software. Each of these virtual servers functions in isolation as a separate device with its operating system and dedicated resources (central processor, RAM, disk space, etc.).

As highlighted above, this approach distinguishes VDS from shared hosting and VPS, where server resources are divided between all users, which can lead to a decrease in performance due to the "neighbor effect".

VDS is also often compared to dedicated physical servers, i.e. to physically existing machines in a data center that are rented in their entirety, and rather than working with an already existing infrastructure, the whole thing has to be built from scratch. At the same time, the two differ significantly in terms of management and scalability. For example, VDS users can easily increase or decrease the number of dedicated resources depending on their current needs without the hassle of physically replacing hardware or moving to another server, which is often required when using dedicated servers.

This flexibility, along with performance and lower cost, make VDS an ideal solution for startups, growing projects, and companies with variable traffic. It is worth remembering that there are no universal solutions to every problem, so this tool has its own range of uses. Let's take a closer look at what kinds of businesses benefit from this tool and how it is most often used.

VDS for business: from online stores to startups

The scale of virtual dedicated server use is quite significant. Businesses in different industries look to it as a solution. Listing them all would be too long and tedious, so instead let’s look at a couple of trending areas as well as the reasons why VDS was chosen:

• E-commerce: high performance and stability for small online stores. These factors give them a good user experience, which increases sales. This is especially relevant for those who have grown beyond the capabilities of regular hosting, but are not yet ready to move to a large-scale cloud infrastructure or a dedicated server, where everything has to be independently built and configured from scratch.
• Startups: a secure and isolated environment for corporate applications and databases, which is critical to maintaining business processes and ensuring data privacy. The result is a workspace where young companies can develop, test, and deploy their applications or websites.
• Small media: news portals and blogs provide stable operation and fast page load times, which directly affects user experience (customer satisfaction), conversion, and search engine position.
• Gaming platforms and SaaS applications: suitable if high performance and stability are required at low costs for cloud infrastructure.
• Education and research institutions: a convenient remote workspace for conducting research, testing, or training.
• Developers and designers: an ideal platform for developing and testing applications in a controlled environment, which allows for rapid deployment and scalability of resources as needed, and allows for a visual demonstration of the project to the client.
• Businesses requiring geotargeting: placing a website or application in the location of the target audience in case the business is aimed at specific geographic markets.

This list is far from exhaustive, and you can easily find other relevant areas with their own reasons for choosing VDS. Learning about its technical characteristics and advantages can also help you decide whether VDS is right for your business.

Technical advantages of VDS for business

VDS can be viewed as the first stable user stage of business virtualization: it allows you to optimize IT resources, increase operational efficiency, and become a catalyst for innovation and competitiveness in the market, simplifying management and reducing equipment costs. Let's see how this works on the technical side:

• Isolation: each VDS works in isolation — a certain amount of resources (CPU, RAM, storage) is allocated, independent from other users, unlike what can happen in shared hosting and VPS. Thus, technical or other problems on one machine do not affect others. In addition, having a separate operating system gives full control over all server settings and files, ensuring a high level of privacy.
• Flexibility: right from the start, at the configuration stage, the user can select the necessary software and application versions, vCPU parameters, RAM, disk space, and other additional technical specs.
• Scalability: resources (CPU, RAM, storage) can be easily added (with growth and expansion) or removed at any point during operation, depending on the current needs of the business.
• Great variability: if the business experiences changes, you can easily leave the virtual server or move to the next level in complexity and scale —  cloud infrastructure. To learn more about this, see our corresponding page.
• Security: Hacking and attacks can happen to any website. Therefore, high-level VDS providers offer tools for data protection: WAF (Web Application Firewall) technologies to protect against hacks, as well as protection against DDOS attacks, isolation from other virtual servers, dedicated IP addresses, SSL certificates, etc.
• Information storage (databases): VDS is also great for storing and managing databases with easy access and recovery, reducing the risk of data loss and maintaining uninterrupted business operations.
• Backups: In case of technical failures and errors or hacking attacks, it is important to have up-to-date backups of the site. Many VDS solutions include tools for creating backups and snapshots of the system state, which increases security and simplifies the recovery process.
• Admin management: Intuitive control panels and tools greatly simplify work, especially for those who do not have deep technical skills. Cost benefits: VDS is usually more affordable than a physically dedicated server with similar characteristics, and its deployment does not require help from highly specialized professionals, such as virtual infrastructure architects.
• Support: high-end VDS providers offer quality support services that are ready to help 24/7, which is vital for quickly resolving technical issues.

How to choose the right VDS provider for your business

When choosing a VDS provider, it is important to consider several key factors that determine the efficiency and reliability of the products and services they offer:

• Uptime is a critical factor that ensures access to a website or application without significant disruptions. A 99.95% availability SLA (considered by many to be the gold standard) or higher is an industry standard that indicates the provider’s reliability.
• The quality of customer support also plays an important role, as timely and qualified technical support can be invaluable in critical situations.
• Scalability, which will provide future flexibility as you grow and expand your resources without having to migrate to other platforms.
• Security should include data protection measures and tools such as antivirus software, firewalls, encryption, and regular backups.
• The pricing structure should be transparent and predictable, with a clear understanding of what is included in the price and what additional costs may arise as services are expanded.

Conclusion

To summarize the above, we can confidently state that a significant advantage of VDS is the democratization of advanced cloud technologies for companies of any level, relevant services, and computing resources that are simple to manage.

In addition, cloud servers allow companies to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, make significant savings, and develop their business faster without spending money, time, and resources on building their own large-scale infrastructure and maintaining it. At the same time, capital expenditures (Capex) are transferred to operating costs (Opex), and it becomes possible to pay only for those resources that the company actually consumes within a Pay-as-you-go system.

As a result, IT costs are reduced, and the development and implementation of new solutions is accelerated. VDS therefore becomes more than just a tool for business – it can be the key to increasing competitiveness, operational efficiency, and financial stability.

In the modern business world, where speed, flexibility, and efficiency play a crucial role, technology is becoming a loyal ally of entrepreneurs and enterprises.