What To Choose: Managed or Unmanaged VPS Hosting?

VPS hosting offers a magnitude of greater control over your website’s server, but with this power comes responsibility. If you don’t know how to manage a web server, you may be utterly clueless how to take advantage of VPS hosting. Managed hosting options are available, but usually are significantly more expensive than unmanaged VPS hosting. Both managed and unmanaged VPS hosting offer excellent speed, usually with guaranteed 20 mbps connections, and prevent you from sharing resources with other customers, but which option is right for you?

Managed hosting

With managed VPS hosting, you’re promised fast and efficient help from your host’s administration team for all your technical issues. That team is responsible for the setup and maintenance of your server’s hardware, software, and day-to-day management. In short; managed hosting is a hands-off approach for people who are not technically savvy enough or lack the time to run and maintain their own server, but are confident that their server will need routine maintenance.

Unmanaged hosting

Unmanaged VPS hosting means that your host maintains only the physical server and its availability. Beyond installing the operating system on your portion of the server, your host will do little else. You will have to maintain, upgrade, and install all necessary software on your own. Usually there are also restrictions regarding your root access and available application software. Tech support is restricted to failure within the hardware or service outages, and data backup is generally your own responsibility.

Unmanaged VPS hosting is attractive because you are given the power of a dedicated server minus the cost and maintenance of that server, and it is a cost effective option for those know how intense their management needs are and are able to handle them without the assistance of their host. To put it simply, unmanaged hosting is ideal for those with a lower budget or with the technical expertise necessary to run a server. However, if you lack such expertise and are confident that your server will not need a 24/7 babysitter, learning the barebones management skills necessary to run a server should take no more than a month.