VPSs explained
Whether you’re talking about VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) or VDSs (Virtual Dedicated Servers) you’re talking about the splitting of a larger dedicated server into smaller virtual machines, each of which can run with their own operating system, and behave almost identically to a stand alone server.
There are various ways to achieve this, the most well know probably being using a piece of software from SWSoft (now rebranded as Parallels) called Virtuozzo.
With Virtuozzo you can take a large dedicated server and split it into smaller partitions, each acting like a cocoon with its own shell environment, root access, etc, and each VPS having little or no effect on the other VPSs hosted on the same dedicated server.
When you purchase a VPS running under Virtuozzo, you then get access to a server control panel, that allows you to perform numerous tasks. Below is a list of tasks that can be performed and also a screenshot of a Virtuozzo Power Panel.
- Start / Stop the VPS
- Change your password
- Repair the VPS
- Check resource usage
- View status changes
- View QoS alerts
- Actions performed log
- Traffic log
- Power Panel manual download
- Configuration of Power Panel
- Detailed list of applications installed
- Other VPS details (IP, host-name, etc.)
- Integrated file manager
Having got your virtual server you can then add a hosting control panel (cPanel/WHM, DirectAdmin, Plesk, etc.) with which to manage a large number of operations on the VPS, and to host domains, emails, etc.
