As a buyer myself, there are a few things i would look into when getting a VPS. We have so many VPS provider and now we even have Cloud Server or Cloud VPS that are different from traditional VPS services. Now, with so many different choices of providers and type of technologies, buyers are spoil for choice. What are the things to look for in a VPS provider? Here are my list of things i will recommend anyone to look into as you might have already be a technical person to even looking for a VPS services.
Support
The number one things to look for are the support. What kind of support do your VPS provider provides? You do not want your customers calling you and you have zero support from your VPS provider. You won’t be happy and neither will your customers.
Price
Pricing is very important in choosing who you are going with. Especially with common goods such as VPS where there are tons of provider in the market. Not every provider provides the same thing at the same price. Do your search to find the best value with the lowest price you can get.
Location
This is a very interesting point. Everyone will just go for price rather than location. If your target audience are from Korea and the latency from your country to the cheapest provider in US is 200-300ms, due to pricing, you decides to choose that VPS provider, you just sacrificing your website SEO and user experience of your website for pricing. And you do not want to do that. Look at your target audience and choose the nearest or lowest ping within your budget.
Server Hardware
Server hardware is one of the most important factor that i look into. Not all SSD or HDD are build the same. But i will usually go for SSD VPS Provider due to the fact that a good SSD hard disk such as Samsung 850 Pro can fetch 500Mb/sec for both read and write with 10x faster io speed and many more. CPU and RAM all has its differences.
Cloud vs VPS
The next important part is VPS vs Cloud. At the moment, Cloud and VPS pricing are almost the same with Cloud being the more expensive one. There are reasons for it to be expensive as VPS has many pitfall that Cloud services do not have (subjective to how it is implemented). Basically, Cloud services if implemented correctly, reduce the risk of hardware and network failure with redundancy equipments as compare to the traditional VPS services. But it still boil down to your needs.
Datacenter
I’m sure if you are in the US, you don’t really have to care much about the datacenter facilities since they are almost the same due to competitive market in the state. However, in many other country around the world, Datacenter does makes a differences. Especially if the datacenter are Tier 1 or 2 which provides lower uptime and datacenter availability. For more info, you can read more about Datacenter Tier or you can click on the image above.
Needs
What are you trying to do? Are you trying to purchase a VPS service for a budget client? Are you looking for a backup VPS services? Does your services doesn’t really care about uptime? If that’s the case, you can definitely look at lowering down your bracket instead of getting what you want because of all the other benefits that comes with it. Remember, you can always upgrade!
Company Reputation
Since you are paying the same pricing or even higher. Do a check on who you are in bed with. It’s important to know who they are and whether they are doing great. You do not want your data gone missing due to hacker or business close down where your data would be lose forever.
Terms and Condition
Not all terms and condition are created equally. Some company allows you to run certain software while others do not. Do read carefully and make you that the software you are going to install are allow in their services. If you are too lazy to go through it, just ask their support! Some even limit your bandwidth if you continuously uses too much bandwidth but others doesn’t. Do take a good look at it.
Bandwidth and Uplink Port
Most buyer will just look at the Bandwidth allowed in their package. eg. 1TB transfer etc. However, do you know that different VPS provider has different uplink port in their rack? In US or Europe, finding a uplink port of 1Gps-10Gps would be easy. However, in Asia, finding a provider who provides you with 100mbps-1Gbps for the WHOLE rack is pretty difficult. Do take note on this as well.