V

PS

 

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. A

VPS

runs its own copy of an operating system, and customers have

superuser-level access

to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any required software that runs on their

virtualized OS

. For many purposes they are functionally equivalent to a dedicated physical server, and being software defined are able to be much more easily created and configured. They are priced much lower than an equivalent physical server, but as they share the underlying physical hardware with other

VPSs

, performance may be lower, and may depend on the workload of other instances on the same hardware node.