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.