You’ve got an excellent VPS server that’s helping your high-traffic website stay up and running at all times. The world is a better place as far as the website is concerned—security and speeds are high, scalability is a non-issue, you have oodles of bandwidth on tap. However, if you analyze your VPS server usage, you will often find that your server is grossly underutilized.

What is a virtual private server or VPS?

Shared hosting, dedicated hosting and VPS hosting are ways to host your website and software on the internet so people can access them.

Shared hosting is the most cost-effective way to host websites. In shared hosting, your hosting provider distributes space, memory, bandwidth and computing power of a server between multiple clients. This is good for low traffic websites that do not have much traffic.

Dedicated server hosting is the most powerful type of hosting that you can get. You have total control of the server where you host your website. This option is used by extremely high-traffic websites and solutions where you need many computing resources or have security requirements and compliance guidelines to follow.

A VPS server or Virtual Private Server hosts multiple clients’ data and applications on a single physical server. Although this may seem similar to a traditional shared hosting set-up initially, the underlying architecture sets these two apart. To simplify this further, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is an instance of an operating system like Linux or Windows, which runs on an underlying physical server. That physical server can run multiple VPS instances with various configurations.

What are the main reasons for underutilized VPS hosting?

Overprovisioning is common on VPS hosting. This is often due to three main reasons:

• Your traffic prediction relies on peak requirement analysis, which considers sporadic spikes and does not accurately showcase your requirements.
• Your VPS hosting configuration has resources and tools that are no longer in use.
• You purchased a VPS hosting plan at a discount with an annual commitment and cannot downgrade it.

Fortunately, VPS servers can be scaled up or down on-demand. Still, often, you may get enticed by high-performance hosting available at low rates on an annual commitment, in which case your server will remain underutilized for up to 90% of the time.

What can I do with my VPS hosting except for hosting my website?

A lot! VPS servers are extremely powerful and reliable. You can easily use them to perform CPU, bandwidth, RAM and drive intensive tasks without your website users noticing it. Here are five extremely cool things you can do with your VPS hosting:

1. Create a gaming server – Although this is not a business requirement, we can all do some fun once in a while, right? Gaming is an excellent way to develop cognitive skills. With a VPS hosting that has lots of resources, you can easily host a private server to run games like Minecraft, Runescape, and World of Warcraft. A VPS server is more cost-effective than a home server, has top-of-the-line hardware for a fraction of the price, is very secure and private and suffers from no performance and stability issues. If you run a company and have developers who like gaming, you can have an in-house gaming competition as a great team-building activity.
2. Host websites for others – Got a lot of free space and bandwidth? Host websites for friends and family, or even start this as a side gig! Your customers can benefit from the added security and speed while utilizing the extra resources you have at hand.
3. Deploy a personal cloud – Don’t like the privacy policy of Google, Dropbox or box? No problems! Using apps such as ownCloud, you can now host your file sharing service that includes calendars, task managers, document editing and galleries, along with data sync to ensure security and total control.
4. Encrypt your wireless connections – Virtual private networks or VPNs can help you connect to the internet securely without worrying about others intercepting your connection or breaking into your computer. Hosting a VPN on a VPS can help you create a secure, safe and private connection on a public network. VPNs encrypt your wireless connection, making it impossible for hackers to break into your computer.
5. Host business email – Business email hosting is a breeze on a VPS. With oodles of computing power, bandwidth, memory and storage space on tap, VPS hosting is perfect for secure business email. You can decide every aspect of your email service and ensure the privacy, reliability and efficiency that you need.

Other than the ones we listed, there are many more things that you can do with VPS hosting. You can test or develop code, run a development server, run private analytics, manage your projects, run a VOIP server, manage your IoT devices and much, much more!

Put your VPS hosting to good use!

The possibilities are endless with VPS hosting. If you have underutilized VPS hosting, there’s so much more you can do except just hosting your website. At Pack Web Hosting, we encourage our VPS hosting clients to buy the server configuration they need by helping them analyze trends and finalize what is optimal for their use case.

However, if your website traffic drops over time or if your focus switches to another project, we can help you either down-scale your VPS hosting or help you put your VPS hosting resources to good use. Our expert systems administrators can easily set up email servers, VPN services, automation services, and IoT-enabled “smart” services.

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