Hosting Service Level Agreement

Service Level Agreement (SLA) is one of the important aspects to make sure you read and understand before ordering your VPS service (or any other service).

Uptime: is an important condition which includes power uptime and network uptime.  You also need to know how they are going to handle their inadequacy (i.e. how they are going to compensate you in case of failure to satisfy their uptime promise).

VPS Payment models

What kind of payment models your virtual private server (VPS) provider offer?

• Monthly: You should get this when trying/testing a new VPS provider.
• Quarterly: Usually you get a discount if you buy 3 months in advance.
• Annually: There are some plans where you can only pay annually (really small 64 - 128 MB plans) and usually you get a discount.
• Hourly: This applies only to cloud VPS hosting.

VPS Payment methods

Payment methods usually used by VPS providers:

• PayPal: Beware of the recurring subscription feature, it won't cancel itself when you terminate your account. You have to to cancel it through PayPal's interface.
• Skrill (Formerly MoneyBookers)
• Credit / Debit cards: Don't use with new / untrusted providers
• Bank transfers
• Crypto currencies such as Bitcoin

Some providers support multiple payment methods and others could only support one method. Usually when dealing with reputable providers, you wouldn't need to think about the payment method or if you could trust them with your banking details or credit card details.

VPS network bandwidth

VPS network bandwidth is not to be confused with network traffic.  Network bandwidth is the data transfer rate or speed. It is always expressed as data unit per unit time, example: 1 Mbps = 1 Megabits per second, another is 1 Gbps = 1 Gigabit per second.

So when you see 100 Mbps network bandwidth that means the theoretical speed is 100 Mbps which might be attained or not.

Why you should get higher bandwidth when possible?

Higher bandwidth means more visitors served without saturating your network connection, if you do saturate your link, that means users will wait and if a user wait, then they might as well close your page.  This of course happens only when you have a lot of visitors, most people need not to worry about their bandwidth.

Average web page size is increasing as time goes, having higher bandwidth helps in this situation.

VPS denial-of-service protection

Denial-of-service (DoS) protection is one the features some VPS providers provide for a fee or free to go along with your hosting plan.

Most people won't need this feature unless they have provoked somebody.  So if you haven't heard about DoS attacks, then you don't need to pay for this feature, if they provide it for free then good.