Symlinks are used a lot in Linux- and Unix-based systems so you may be wondering as to what exactly a “symlink” is.  If you have Linux VPS Hosting and you use SSH, you’ll often find many files in the file structure are symlinks.

What are symlinks used for?

Symlinks are a specific type of file that has a reference to a physical location on the Linux server hard drive – such as another file or directory that exists on the machine’s hard drive. The most common symlink you’ll likely come across when using an FTP client is the www and public_html directories. The www directory is a symlink to the public_html physical directory. So this means any files or directories uploaded to the www folder is the same as doing so directly in the public_html folder. The two that seemingly look like two separate folders are merely just one.

Why are they useful?

Symlinks are very useful. For example, if you use a Linux-based operating system on your desktop, you could easily create a symbolic link to the Applications folder on your desktop. So in this way, a symlink would act as a shortcut to that specific folder, that resides in a specific location on the hard drive. However, in the case of a Linux web server, you may have an important shell script in one folder but there are two folders on the server that do similar functions, so for human convenience you may want to create a symlink to the shell script on the other similar folder. No extra storage space is really being used; you could simply have multiple copies of the shell script on the hard drive, but that wastes unnecessary space, which is another reason why symlinks are useful.

In fact, symlinks can save a lot of space, because a symlink simply contains a text string that determines where the operating system needs to go to find the physical file or directory on the server.

There are many hosting plans in the web hosting market. Such as, shared hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, colocation hosting but VPS hosting or virtual private server hosting is the most popular hosting plan of them. A large amount of people prefer VPS hosting for their business. Because users get a great level of reliability and security with a cheap price. To get better result users have to take care of their virtual servers. There are many ways to take care of virtual server, but we will discuss about some main points :

1. Update the virtual private server :
You have to update your virtual server (it can be Linux VPS or windows VPS) time to time. The main advantage of virtual server (Linux VPS or windows VPS) is that, the servers update automatically when new updates are available. You have to keep in mind that, to get better performance you have to update your virtual server as well as your website.

2. Reboot the virtual private server :
You have to make sure that your virtual server is not overloaded. To get a clear idea about it, you have to reboot your virtual server(Linux VPS or windows VPS). You can schedule your server reboot frequency. It can be once in a week or once in a month. It totally depends on you. Normally, users reboot their servers at the time of server updates.

3. Remove unnecessary data from virtual server :
The web space is a very important factor in the Virtual Private Servers. So, you have to make sure that, there is no unnecessary data cover your web space. You have to update your Virtual server and website and also clear up the unnecessary data frequently to get a faster and more efficient virtual server.

You can follow the above most important and easy points to get better performance and uptime with your virtual server.

If any business owners don’t have much technical knowledge then suitable hosting plan selection is a big issue. Because they can’t understand the difference between different hosting plan and also different operating system. To solve this problem they have to spend some more time to know about web hosting. At first they have to get a clear idea about operating systems then get an idea about hosting plans. They have to keep in mind that, success of their business depends on the selection of suitable operating system and also hosting plan.

There are mainly two kinds of operating system available in the web hosting market. One is Linux operating system and another one is Windows operating system. Linux VPS hosting or cpanel hosting concept is related to Linux open source operating system. Linux is an open source operating system which makes the software freely available to anyone and allows them to use, improve, modify and redistribute versions easily, on the other hand windows VPS hosting concept is related to windows operating system, developed by Microsoft.

As per our previous discussion, we know that windows is developed by Microsoft and Linux is an open source operating system and for that reason Linux hosting is cheaper than windows hosting. One more thing about Linux hosting, It is very popular for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php/Perl/Python) server software combination. Web developers prefer Linux and several open source softwares have been created for free use of discerning web enthusiasts.

User gets much more reliability with Linux VPS hosting than Windows VPS hosting. If we compare Linux vps hosting and windows vps hosting then we can find out that, unfortunately windows vps hosting can’t permit 100% up-time but Linux VPS can permit that. Being open source, That’s why to handle load spikes together with loading software and programs that could occupy less information space than Windows VPS programs. On the other hand Windows users get permission to use remote desktop access and also in this case any non technical user can manage their server very easily but in case of Linux vps hosting user have to get some knowledge about command-line interface. Users get the advantages of remote desktop access to modify your virtual server with windows vps hosting.

Which operating system would be suitable totally depends on the what the webmaster proposes to do with his website. Before choosing any operating system you have to get some important points about both operating systems. You can go through the second part of this blog to get those points.