India English
Kenya English
United Kingdom English
South Africa English
Nigeria English
United States English
United States Español
Indonesia English
Bangladesh English
Egypt العربية
Tanzania English
Ethiopia English
Uganda English
Congo - Kinshasa English
Ghana English
Côte d’Ivoire English
Zambia English
Cameroon English
Rwanda English
Germany Deutsch
France Français
Spain Català
Spain Español
Italy Italiano
Russia Русский
Japan English
Brazil Português
Brazil Português
Mexico Español
Philippines English
Pakistan English
Turkey Türkçe
Vietnam English
Thailand English
South Korea English
Australia English
China 中文
Somalia English
Canada English
Canada Français
Netherlands Nederlands

7 Cool Things You Can Do With a VPS

Last updated on July 7th, 2021 at 08:55 am

In this article, you are going to learn about 7 cool things you can do with a VPS

A virtual private server (VPS) is a great platform for website hosting but it can be useful for many other things.

A VPS is an always-on always-connected server capable of running anything that can run on a standard Linux machine. This makes it useful literally any number of projects.

Below are some of the things you might consider doing with your VPS, in addition to hosting your website.

Creating a Private Sync Service

Dropbox makes life easier but it involves syncing your private data to a third-party server over which you don’t have control.

BitTorrent Sync is a private syncing service that allows users to sync their data between multiple devices.

Installing BitTorrent Sync on your VPS creates a syncing platform that matches the functionality of Dropbox without privacy concerns.

Deploy a Personal Cloud

There’s a lot more to the cloud than data syncing – contacts and calendars are also important.

OwnCloud can handle data syncing too but apart from that, it includes a calendar, task manager, document editing, and galleries.

By hosting ownCloud on your VPS, you ensure that it’s both available from wherever you need it to be and also completely secure and under your control.

Encrypt your wireless connections

When connecting to public wireless, you never know if someone is intercepting your connection.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) encrypt the connection between your device and an online server making it impossible for anyone sitting in between to make sense of the data.

There are a lot of VPN solutions available that will work on a virtual private server but OpenVPN is one of the best

Run Private Analytics

This is for those who prefer to host their own web analytics rather than relying on services like Google Analytics.

Matomo is a feature-rich web analytics tool that includes most of the features in Google Analytics including real-time analytics, geolocation, visitor tracking, and referer analysis.

Web analytics is however just one of them. You can use your VPS to run business analytics, spinning it up to handle large data-scale data analysis without the need for a dedicated server.

Jupyter is a great example of a VPS-ready app that allows you to do data science in Python – and as an added bonus, it also serves as a development tool (but more on that in a moment).

Manage your Projects

If you run a small business and if that business employs remote workers, then you need a web-accessible project management tool

ProjectLibre is a comprehensive open-source feature-rich project management tool that was voted one of the “Top Ten Open Source Projects Of 2013”.

Develop and test your code

A VPS provides you with a perfect sandbox for development.

You can use your VPS to easily simulate testing environments for your applications, allowing you to debug well before going live.

Manage your IoT Devices

If you have a good number of sensors and smart devices, you can use your VPS as a hub for managing them.

The data you gather can be easily pushed to your VPN and analyzed with the management tool of your choice.

Let us know other cool stuff that you are doing with your VPS.

Also, you can order yourself a VPS from as little as Ksh 800 per month here

Pros and cons of VPS 

The increased cost of VPS hosting is the biggest negative in this type of service

For most websites, shared hosting will suffice and provide you with a much cheaper option than if you were to use the alternative services offered by VPS providers. 

That being said, there are some great benefits that come from using Virtual Private Servers like having more control over your website’s performance.

As well as better security because these servers can be configured specifically for each client whereas, on traditional web hosting, all sites share resources. 

The other benefit is when it comes to loading times; since everything runs off its own dedicated OS (operating system).

Rather than sharing space with dozens or hundreds of other sites, the load times are going to be significantly faster.

In conclusion, Virtual Private Servers can provide you with much better performance and security than traditional web hosts.

But at a fraction of the cost even though they come with their own drawbacks like having less space for your website’s files.

As well as not being able to install certain software on them. 

We recommend using this alternative if speed is important or if you have an eCommerce site that needs more processing power which would allow it to operate more smoothly without any lags in between page loads.

Share some Love

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

× WhatsApp us