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Is the traffic to your business website getting increased day-by-day? Is your present shared hosting plan failing to serve the needs of your visitors? If yes, perhaps it’s time to switch to a better hosting solution.

If you do some research online, you’ll find that VPS (virtual private server) hosting solutions are considered much more powerful and reliable than shared hosting solutions. And the best thing about VPS hosting is that it comes at a much lower cost than the cost of dedicated server hosting.

In fact, with VPS, you get somewhat similar benefits offered by dedicated server hosting by paying slightly more than shared hosting.

Now the thing is when it comes to VPS, there are two types of solutions available: managed VPS and unmanaged VPS. A lot of website owners get overwhelmed when it comes to managed VPS vs. unmanaged VPS.

With that in mind, we’ve created this ultimate comparison of managed VPS vs. unmanaged VPS. Here, we’ll discuss every important thing you need to know to make an informed decision.

So, let’s get started with the basics.

What Is VPS Hosting?

In a VPS hosting environment, an actual physical server is divided into multiple servers through the use of virtualization technology. Each of these servers has dedicated resources for its users. Therefore, when you choose VPS hosting, whether it’s managed VPS hosting or unmanaged VPS hosting, you get to use those resources exclusively.

So, basically, from the user’s viewpoint, a virtual private server acts much like a dedicated server. If you’re wondering why VPS hosting costs much lesser than dedicated server hosting, the answer lies in how the server is being used by the hosting solution provider.

In VPS hosting, you only get to use one part of an actual server, while in dedicated server hosting, you get to use the entire server.

What Is Managed VPS Hosting?

Now that you’ve got a clear comprehension of what’s VPS, it’s time to delve deeper into the managed VPS vs. unmanaged VPS comparison. However, first, it’s important to know the basics of managed VPS hosting and unmanaged VPS hosting.

Let’s see what managed VPS entails.

Managing a server isn’t an easy task. It requires a significant amount of technical expertise, effort, and time to maintain a server’s top performance. With managed VPS, your hosting service provider is entirely responsible for managing the server. Be it updating its components or protecting it from security vulnerabilities, your hosting provider will take care of every server-related responsibility.

This is one of the biggest reasons a huge number of website owners choose managed VPS hosting over unmanaged VPS hosting. Even if you have the technical expertise, managing the server instead of focusing on your business typically becomes a huge burden.

And if you don’t have enough knowledge of how to manage a server, perhaps there’s no option other than choosing managed VPS hosting. Many people think that choosing managed VPS typically costs significantly more than opting for unmanaged VPS hosting.

However, the truth is that you can choose cheap VPS hosting solutions such as an SSD VPS server from a reputable provider like Elite Server Management. By purchasing cheap VPS hosting solutions from such a provider, you can easily enjoy all the benefits of a managed VPS server at affordable costs.

What Are the Benefits of Choosing Managed VPS Hosting?

Now that you know what’s managed VPS hosting, let’s see the reasons why countless website owners choose this option.

• Your hosting service provider monitors the server 24/7, meaning you get to concentrate on your primary objectives fully. And unless you’re an established business with a dedicated IT support team, this greatly helps you in growing your business.
• If you don’t have enough expertise in maintaining a server, there’s no need to panic. This is because web hosting providers that offer managed VPS have a robust technical team to take care of all the maintenance tasks required to maintain the server’s top performance.
• In today’s era of a steadily increasing number of cyberattacks, it has become simply a must to fix security issues immediately and protect the server as much as possible. Managed VPS hosting service providers not only monitor the servers constantly for viruses and malware, but they also regularly perform security audits to spot security vulnerabilities. The advanced tools used by these teams often remain beyond the reach of many website owners.
• With managed VPS, you often get an easy-to-use control panel to manage your site effortlessly. This control panel lets carry out things like creating databases, adding files to the server, monitoring server performance, etc. This essentially makes the management of the website much easier.
• You’ll get to leverage the power of advanced tools without having to pay anything for them. Your hosting service provider will use them to boost the performance of your server without charging you anything extra.
• Meeting ongoing compliance requirements is a time-consuming and difficult task. With managed VPS, your hosting provider will take care of this, letting you focus on your business.
• Sudden spikes in traffic are quite common for business websites. When you choose managed VPS hosting, the technical team of your hosting service provider continually monitors the volume of your site’s incoming traffic. This constant monitoring helps to ensure that your site won’t crash or poorly perform even if it needs to handle an unprecedented amount of traffic.
• It’s true that the cost of managed VPS is more than that of unmanaged VPS hosting. However, there are two important things that you should consider when deciding on managed VPS vs. unmanaged VPS. First, you can choose a cheap SSD VPS to reduce the cost. And second, it’s always wise to pay slightly more for managed VPS than hiring a full-fledged technical team.

What Is Unmanaged VPS Hosting?

With unmanaged VPS hosting, the responsibility of managing the server comes entirely to you. Your hosting service provider cannot be held responsible for nothing more than the original physical server and its proper availability in terms of guaranteed uptime. But as mentioned above, there are lots of other vital things that need to be taken care of when it comes to managing a server properly.

Right from completing software installation and carrying out maintenance tasks to taking care of core updates, you’ll have to deal with lots of things essential for your server’s top performance. You fail to do any of these and it won’t take much time for the server to demonstrate significantly poor performance.

What Are the Benefits of Choosing Unmanaged VPS Hosting?

We’ve already discussed the benefits of opting for managed VPS. Let’s see the reasons why some website owners still choose unmanaged VPS hosting.

• You can fully customize the VPS server according to your requirements. You can do whatever you want to as long as the resources permit.
• You get complete control over the server in the context of software installation, bandwidth, storage space, memory, usage, etc.
• Unmanaged VPS hosting is more cost-effective than managed VPS because you only need to pay for the server and not for a technical team to manage it.
• You can install and run whatever applications you want to grow your business. Oftentimes, these applications aren’t offered by hosting service providers.
• As you’re managing the server yourself, you can make any changes to it whenever you want without being reliant on an external team.
• You can optimize the server as long as resources are available. Sometimes, this is required to improve user experience and attract more traffic.

Managed VPS Vs. Unmanaged VPS: Taking Your Pick

As you can see above, when it comes to managed VPS vs. unmanaged VPS, both appear with their unique benefits. So, choosing between these two comes down to your unique situation and requirements.

If you want to focus on growing your business without getting deeply involved in managing the server, you should definitely go for managed VPS. This not only helps to ensure that the server delivers its top performance always but it also helps you remain secure and compliant. And as discussed above, there’s no shortage of cheap VPS hosting solutions that can easily help you stay within your budget.

On the contrary, if you have solid expertise in maintaining a server and can invest a significant amount of effort and time in it, you may opt for unmanaged VPS hosting. Before you take this route, it’s important to remember that web hosting providers that offer managed VPS have a solid technical team taking care of their servers. And matching that level of technical knowledge and expertise sometimes becomes simply impossible for even tech-savvy users. It’s also vital to keep in mind that while the cost of unmanaged VPS is typically lower than that of managed VPS hosting, sometimes, the former turns out to be costlier than the latter. This is because if you need to use any advanced tool to manage or maintain the server, you’ll have to procure it yourself.

We hope that this comparison has provided you with enough information on managed VPS vs. unmanaged VPS. Just compare your requirements against what we’ve discussed in this article, and you should be able to take the right decision quickly.