When looking for a VPS hosting solution, some of the main questions you are likely to ask yourself are how secure is VPS hosting regardless of VPS price, and what additional security measures can be offered by hosting providers. If you are considering buying a VPS server, but can’t make up your mind as you are concerned about security, then we suggest you read the article below.
The Nature of VPS
The first thing you should pay attention to is how the nature of VPS hosting as such provides you with a better level of security for developing your projects.
A VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and along with dedicated hosting it’s one of the available hosting solutions. Unlike a dedicated server, with VPS you get only a part of an entire physical server. However, unlike shared hosting, this part is fully dedicated to you, with exact amounts of resources allocated to your needs regardless of VPS price. This is achieved through virtualization technology that allows the creation of separate virtual instances based on the original physical machine.
When it comes to security this virtualized part reaches almost the level of security offered by a dedicated server. This way you won’t be bothered by the presence of your neighbors. In shared hosting you may never fully rely on your hosting, especially in the case of responsible projects. Its performance may be a bit unstable when your neighbors’ resource consumption rises. Besides that, you also are more vulnerable when a hacking attack takes place. Once cybercriminals find a way to hack a user of a shared hosting server, the rest of the users are also at risk. However, this isn’t the case with VPS hosting, as each virtual server is in fact an isolated environment.
Besides that, a VPS allows for much more customization. Since virtual machines are isolated from each other to the point of having separate operating systems and root access, you have much more freedom to set up whatever security measures you see fit being fully responsible for the destiny of your VPS.
Security Measures Offered by The Provider
As you can see, VPS is by default a solution with a better level of security in all terms. However, besides that, you can also get your security enhanced by features offered by the provider. Let’s have a look at some of them:
- Support: Once an issue has occurred, it doesn’t mean that everything is lost. The sooner you start mitigating the problem, the better. In this regard, the technical support team of the provider can be extremely helpful.
- DDoS protection: DDoS attacks are one of the most common ways of interfering with the performance of websites. Using a distributed network of bots, the attacker sends thousands of faked requests to your server making it work slower or go down. To avoid these attacks, one common practice is the implementation of firewalls that filter and monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic, with a huge chance of blocking some unrelated and potentially malicious traffic. If your server, however, eventually happens to be a victim of a DDoS attack. In this case, many providers offer special DDoS protection solutions. These solutions are able to absorb a DDoS attack by rerouting it on specialized servers, whereas your VPS is not hit by the attack.
- Free SSH certificates: Many hosting providers include free SS certificates in their plans. Security Shell certificates are key to providing encrypted communication for secure access to the VPS. In addition to that, users can configure SSH to use key-based authentication for an additional layer of security. SSH certificates not only make sure that the information that goes through the site is encrypted but also greatly contribute to the SEO optimization of the website.
- Managed services: Many hosting providers offer managed hosting apart from standard hosting plans. Managed hosting consists in your provider taking care of a significant part of your VPS management, monitoring its resources and other processes, optimizing its configuration, making sure all updates are installed, etc. In this way, you may pay less deliberate attention to the things going on on your website, while still having peace of mind that it’s taken care about.
- Network security measures: What many hosting providers do to preserve the integrity of your VPS’ security is the implementation of network security measures, such as intrusion detection and prevention systems. This significantly reduces the chances of your website getting hacked.
How to Reach a Better Level of Security When Using a VPS?
As you have seen, a VPS is by default a hosting solution for those, for whom security in hosting matters. If you want to optimize your level of security even more, you can apply special configuration to your VPS, install appropriate security solutions as well as to look for providers offering additional layers of security.
We hope that this article has made clear some aspects of VPS’ security and wish you good luck.