VPS Server Hosting

What is a VPS and how is it different from shared hosting?

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a virtual server with its own operating system, its own IP address and its own share of resources; unlike shared hosting, the entire software layer of the server belongs to you. On shared hosting, hundreds of sites use the same operating system, the same web server and the same PHP configuration, and you only manage your own folder. On a VPS you decide which web server, which database and which language versions run.

The clearest sign that it is time to move to a VPS is when your site needs a long-running Node.js process, WebSocket connections, a queue worker or a custom PHP extension.

What can you run on a VPS?

You can run almost any internet-connected software that works on Linux or Windows; the only limit is the resources of the plan you choose. The most common use cases are:

• Workflow automation: an n8n server that connects your CRM, email and APIs.
• Container stacks: running a database, an application and a reverse proxy together with Docker Compose on a Docker server.
• Private networking: a company or personal VPN server with WireGuard or OpenVPN.
• Bots: Discord bot hosting and Telegram bots that must stay online 24/7.
• Web applications: Laravel, Django, Next.js, WordPress and their queue workers.
• Development and testing: staging environments, CI runners and Git servers.
• Light game and voice servers: TeamSpeak or game servers with a small number of players.

A VPS is not always the right fit. If you only want to publish a WordPress site and do not want to maintain a server, managed hosting means less work. Compute jobs that keep the CPU at full load all day need dedicated cores, and AI models need a graphics card. Choosing the right class matters more than choosing the right plan size.

Because there are no operating-system-level restrictions, a VPS becomes a lab where you can try anything: a misconfiguration only affects your own server.

What is a vCPU, and what does KVM VPS performance depend on?

A vCPU is a thread of the host's physical CPU cores that is shared between virtual servers by time-slicing; KVM VPS performance is the combination of vCPU count, memory and disk speed. This sharing model is what makes a VPS affordable: most web applications use the CPU heavily in short bursts and lightly the rest of the time, and shared cores handle that fluctuating load efficiently.

KVM gives each VPS full virtualisation with its own Linux kernel. Compared with older container-based models, this has three practical advantages:

• Docker, WireGuard and custom kernel modules work without issues.
• Memory is reserved for you; no other server can use it.
• Different operating systems, including Windows, can be installed.

On the storage side, NVMe reduces wait times for database and file operations. For workloads that keep the CPU near 100% for hours (video encoding, heavy databases, build servers), a VDS server with dedicated cores delivers more consistent results.

Which operating system should you choose?

You pick the operating system from the list on the order screen; installation is automatic, and for most web projects a long-term-support Linux distribution is the right choice. Ubuntu LTS is easy for beginners thanks to its large community and up-to-date packages; Debian stands out for stability and simplicity on servers that will run untouched for a long time; RHEL-compatible distributions such as AlmaLinux suit software that expects that family, such as cPanel. The available versions are shown on the order screen.

Windows Server is needed for .NET Framework applications, MSSQL or desktop software that only runs on Windows. Check the licence terms when ordering. If you only need a Windows environment over Remote Desktop, an RDP server is the more practical option.

Changing the operating system later requires a reinstall and wipes the disk, so make your first choice based on the versions officially supported by the software you plan to run.

How do you connect to and configure a new VPS?

You connect to a Linux VPS over SSH and to a Windows VPS over Remote Desktop (RDP); the IP address and initial login details appear on the service screen of the customer panel once provisioning is complete. The built-in OpenSSH client on Windows, or the terminal on macOS and Linux, is all you need.

The configuration you do in the first session determines how secure the server will be over the following months:

1. Update all packages and enable automatic security updates.
2. Create a user with sudo rights and enable SSH key login.
3. Disable SSH login as root and password authentication.
4. Open only the ports you actually use in the firewall.
5. Set the time zone and the hostname.
6. If memory is small, create a swap file.

After that you can install a web server such as Nginx, or a full LEMP stack (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB/MySQL, PHP).

How do you choose the right VPS plan?

Choose a VPS plan by the memory and CPU your application needs at peak, plus room to grow; disk and traffic are usually secondary. Follow this order:

1. Memory: add up the operating system, web server, database, application processes and cache. For Docker stacks, add up each container's memory use separately.
2. vCPU: look at the number of concurrent requests or parallel jobs. Background workloads that run continuously can keep one vCPU busy on their own.
3. Disk: leave at least twice the space for data, log files, Docker images and local backups.
4. Traffic: estimate monthly transfer for media-heavy sites; a CDN reduces this load.

The current vCPU, memory, disk and traffic values of each plan are listed in the table on this page. The general rule is to start one plan smaller and measure real usage; resources can be upgraded with your data intact, so there is no need to buy the largest plan up front.

What network and data center infrastructure do the VPS servers run on?

LIONFIN VPS servers run on a network with 600 Gbit/s of total upstream capacity, in data center racks where the cold aisle is kept between 18 and 24 °C. Upstream capacity is the total outbound bandwidth connecting the network to the rest of the internet; a high figure prevents congestion both during traffic peaks and during volumetric attacks. More about the facility is on the data center page.

All traffic passes through the RouteFence firewall layer. RouteFence filters bandwidth-flooding DDoS attacks at the network level before they reach your server, so your application keeps receiving clean traffic.

The infrastructure is watched 24/7 by NOC (network and hardware monitoring) and SOC (security event monitoring) teams. Our uptime target is 99.99%; this is a target, not a guarantee. Tracking your site's availability with an external monitoring service on your side also lets you spot problems before your users do.

How do you secure your VPS?

VPS security is built in layers: network-level DDoS filtering is handled by LIONFIN, while operating system and application security is your responsibility. The measures that help most inside the server are:

• Firewall: with UFW, deny all incoming connections by default and open only what you need. If you use Docker, remember that published container ports can bypass UFW rules; publish ports only on 127.0.0.1 and put a reverse proxy in front.
• Brute-force protection: Fail2Ban temporarily blocks repeated failed logins.
• Updates: apply security patches automatically and plan a reboot after kernel updates.
• Secrets: keep API keys and database passwords in environment variables, not in your Git repository.
• Least privilege: run each application under its own system user.

How should you plan VPS backups and snapshots?

Plan VPS backups on two layers: snapshots for quick rollback, and regular backups stored off the server for long-term safety. A snapshot is a restore point taken just before a major update or configuration change, but because it lives on the same infrastructure it does not count as a backup on its own.

A recommended setup for durable backups:

• Back up databases every night with a dump (mysqldump, pg_dump).
• Copy application files and configuration incrementally to another location with restic or borg.
• If you use Docker, back up the volumes and the docker-compose.yml file rather than the containers.
• Once a month, test restoring from backup onto an empty server.

Some VPS plans include daily backups; the plan card states which ones.

Should you install a control panel on your VPS?

A control panel saves time if you will manage several sites, email accounts and DNS zones; if you run a single application it usually just consumes resources. Decision criteria:

• cPanel/WHM: the common standard for agencies and resellers that host sites for clients; requires a paid licence and runs on RHEL-compatible distributions and Ubuntu.
• Plesk: supports both Linux and Windows and suits developers with WordPress Toolkit and Git integration; requires a paid licence.
• No panel: for a single Laravel, Node.js or Docker application, Nginx + systemd or Docker Compose is lighter and more transparent.

Panel licences are bound to your server's IP address and are available in our control panel licences category. The panel itself also uses memory, so include that headroom when choosing a plan.

Which software stack should you install on a VPS?

The stack depends on your application's language and how you deploy it; the three most common setups are LEMP for PHP sites, Docker Compose for multi-service projects, and a lean systemd-managed install for a single Node.js or Python service.

Whichever stack you choose, set up a Let's Encrypt certificate for HTTPS with automatic renewal and keep your configuration files in a Git repository; if you ever need to rebuild the server from scratch, you can restore the same setup in minutes. Most memory use comes from the database: tuning MariaDB's innodb_buffer_pool_size to your server's memory often makes a bigger difference than leaving the default.

What should you move to when a VPS is no longer enough?

When a VPS is no longer enough, first scale up within the same class; if what you need is consistency, special hardware or isolation, move up a class. The symptoms tell you which way to go:

If you plan to host sites for several clients, the reseller hosting vs VPS comparison helps, and if you will only run WordPress, see WordPress hosting vs VPS.