1089 – A good mix of performance and cost: Tom talks VPS Do You Need One

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In this episode, Tom Antion interviews IT expert Larry about Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and whether website owners should use one. They explain that hosting typically falls into three categories: shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers. A VPS sits in the middle—providing the control and performance of a dedicated server but at a lower cost. It works like owning a condo inside a larger building: you have your own isolated environment but share the underlying hardware. The discussion highlights the importance of website speed, proper hosting, and maintaining multiple backups.
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Key Points
1. What a VPS Is
• A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a virtualized server environment running on physical hardware.
• It behaves like a dedicated server, but it actually shares hardware with other VPS instances.
• Users get their own isolated resources and control.
Analogy:
• Shared hosting = renting an apartment
• VPS = owning a condo in a building
• Dedicated server = owning the entire house
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2. Problems with Cheap Shared Hosting
Shared hosting can cause issues such as:
• Too many websites on the same server
• Slower loading times
• Possible association with spam activity
• Hosting companies overcrowding servers to cut costs
If your website loads slowly, visitors may leave immediately.
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3. Advantages of a VPS
A VPS provides:
• Better performance and speed
• Greater control over server settings
• Ability to host multiple websites or domains
• Support for WordPress, membership sites, and e-commerce
• Testing and staging environments
• More stable performance since resources are reserved
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4. Managed VPS vs Self-Managed
Two options exist:
Managed VPS
• Hosting company handles:
o security updates
o monitoring
o backups
o server maintenance
• Ideal for business owners who don't want to manage servers.
Self-Managed VPS
• Cheaper
• Requires strong technical knowledge.
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5. Backup Strategy (Critical Advice)
Never rely on only one backup location.
Recommended approach:
• Server-level backups
• Website backups
• Off-site backups in another location
This protects against hacking, server failure, or company shutdown.
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6. When You Should Consider a VPS
A VPS is worth considering if you:
• Have growing traffic
• Run multiple websites
• Use e-commerce or membership systems
• Run online ads
• Need faster site performance
• Want more control over hosting.
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Main Takeaway
A VPS is the “sweet spot” between cheap shared hosting and expensive dedicated servers, offering better speed, control, and reliability at a reasonable cost—especially for growing online businesses.

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Episode 1089 – VPS Do You Need One
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1089 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to see if you need a VPS. And what is a VPS, you say? Well, my buddy Larry and my chief left hand, right hand guy is going to tell you all about it. And that's what's coming up today in 1089. And hope you didn't miss 1088 and 1085. Those were 1085 was five AI hacks that will just blow you away. And I said, hey, I got so many of them. I'll do another episode 1088 and that'll blow you away, and I'll probably do another one Monday. Next Monday for it. So anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to the episode number. All right. Pick up a copy of our automation book. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is the latest. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com in my school. Certified to operate by SCHEV at IMTCVA.org. Also, if you have any interest in AI or if you're lost to the max on AI because you get pummeled with it every day. I'm doing a masterclass as part of a big AI summit, and I just recorded it today and just blew away the the the guy that runs the summit. So watch for the announcements of that around the ninth or so of what month is this, Larry? March. March of 2026.
[00:01:56] All right, let's bring on Larry. Larry has got, uh. Oh my God. If you ever hear of Doan's pills and a whole bottle's got like a hundred of them in them, that's not even a fraction of the certifications he has in IT stuff. So plus his his boy is in it and, uh, and, um, I don't know who's going to make his wife get into it pretty soon. That's not happening. All right, Larry, so, um, we're talking about vapes, which is a virtual private server. So we got to tell people what that is and when you might want to have one.
[00:02:38] So let me start off by saying I have never, ever been compared with doan's pills ever in my life, and I do.
[00:02:45] Oh, you haven't been compared with some kind of ache. Back ache. Okay. All right.
[00:02:51] Maybe so. And I'm glad you didn't say left hand, right hand, second hand. Because even though I'm kind of used, I'm not that used. Alright.
[00:02:59] So yeah, but you do get hand me ups from your kids.
[00:03:03] Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah.
[00:03:04] Okay, so. And you love.
[00:03:05] Them. For those that have not tagged it like this, I am sure somebody out there in the listening audience has received not hand me downs, but hand me ups from their kids. Meaning they have technology, they get they upgraded, they don't know what to do with it. So they give it to their dad. That's me. I am very happy with that arrangement. It has saved me thousands of dollars in MacBooks and iPhones and Kindles and God knows what else. So it's all good. It's all good. All right.
[00:03:33] All right.
[00:03:34] Vpn, virtual private server. It almost describes exactly what it is, honestly. So let me just give you something right off the bat that's very simple. And I promise to keep this to about ten minutes or so. So we don't overload you with all this other stuff. But this is a very important thing to understand. And most people will think of their websites, for example, like they think of an apartment, you rent a room in a big building, or you move into an apartment in a big building or you can own your own house. So a VPN, a virtual private server is somewhere in the middle. Let me describe. So if you're on a if you have your own hosting plan for your website, which just about everybody else does, unless somebody else is paying for it or covering it, you are either on shared hosting, meaning your website is among could be hundreds, sometimes even thousands of other websites on the same host. Or you can have your own dedicated server, meaning you are the only one that is on that server. There are pros and cons to both. One is a lot cheaper than the other, and so on and so on. So where does a VPN fall into? Is a VPN would be similar to like owning your own condo, but it's inside a building. So let's take a look at this. Uh, servers are physical pieces of hardware. A shared server is still a physical piece of hardware, but you're sharing it with other people. A virtual private server mimics a real piece of hardware, but it's actually virtual, so you will find virtual private servers. Many of those on dedicated pieces of physical hardware. However, you're not paying the same price as a physical server because yours is private and it's virtual. So companies can create these things, expand them, contract them, whatever the needs are. So as far as you're concerned, when you log into your website or into your server, it's all yours. And in fact it is. Except it doesn't really exist. It's not physical.
[00:05:39] All right. Let me jump in here for a second. So I just want to hit the just the regular hosting. See if you don't know what you're doing. They're going to take advantage of you. They're going to keep lumping more and more and more, uh, websites on one physical computer until it will hardly run anymore. And if you don't know any better, your website takes like a calendar to load and you know you're not doing speed tests and you're not complaining to them about it, and then you're just stuck. And then sometimes you get lumped in with spammers, and then that computer looks like it's sending spam. And if you send bulk spam or bulk email out from it, you're lumped in with all spammers. So. So anytime you can get out of just shared hosting or you're smart enough to complain and get them on a server computer that's not so overloaded. See, if you don't complain, they're just going to keep lumping people on there until the thing starts smoking. Right. Exactly right. Because it costs them money.
[00:06:48] They think you're all happy because you haven't said anything. Yeah. When in fact.
[00:06:51] You gotta learn is suffering. Um, I've.
[00:06:54] We should probably do an episode on how to complain to your hosting.
[00:06:58] That could take hours.
[00:07:00] Oh, geez. All right. So anyway, that's why it's, uh. If you don't know how to complain, you might be suffering with just plain cheapo hosting. Even some of these. Larry, I get emails every day. Never pay hosting again. Oh, yes. Well, how stupid is that? I mean, how are they ever going to maintain high quality stuff and keep you from getting hacked and everything? If you pay once and never pay again, that's. So don't get sucked into those kind of deals. But then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got so many websites that we have a dedicated server where I'm the only one on this complete computer. All right. So that's the other end, and you might get to that someday. But in the middle is what we're talking about.
[00:07:42] Right. Exactly. And what what you need to there's think of a seesaw. Only one side of the seesaw can be up at any given time. So in this particular case, if you're sharing hosting you're paying less money. So the less money part of it would be the seesaw part that's down. The seesaw part that's high is going to be the number of websites on the shared host. So the lower they can push the cost down, the more they will jam into a server. You flip that around and you're going to be paying far more money, but you will be the only one on there with a dedicated server via virtual. Private servers are the middle ground. Between those two you will get what looks like a dedicated server. It will be a lot cheaper than getting your own, and you won't have the problem of them lumping a ton of websites on there because you are the only one on it.
[00:08:33] So VPN like that condo analogy you made is that, yeah, there's a great big building, but it's divvied up to your own condo. Nobody else can come and live in your condo with you. Well, they should, and they can do that virtually. Yeah.
[00:08:49] In the IT field there isn't such a thing as a squatter, fortunately. So we're okay there. But what you what can you do these things? The first question I usually get is, well, what am I going to do with this? The exact same thing you would do if you had a dedicated server or if you're on a shared hosting server, you can put WordPress sites on it. Membership sites e-commerce. You can have multiple domains. You can have multiple websites. You can run all sorts of applications email, CRM, custom apps. You can use it for development environments, for testing new things. You can use it for testing and staging, meaning you could put changes into your website and stage it before it goes live so that you make sure your changes work before it goes to a live website. So that's always very important to be able to take take that type of action and you have full control over performance, the amount of caching the server does to make things faster. Uh, the amount of CDN configurations, that's, that's a data delivery network that allows you to reach other parts of the world much, much faster. It allows you to optimize your databases without interference from anybody else. So there's a lot to like about a VPN.
[00:09:57] And especially you don't know the stuff you just said, Larry, probably going to have a geek to set that stuff up? You know.
[00:10:04] Usually.
[00:10:05] For around the world. Yes. But you can still do all the basic stuff yourself on a VPN. Except you're not lumped in with all this.
[00:10:13] And to be fair, with with a lot of those things, many, I'm going to say good hosting platforms. Not your run of the mill el cheapo. Many good hosting platforms set this up for you automatically. So you personally, you don't have to lift a finger. You don't have to push a button. You don't have to call tech support all the time. They handle all that for you in the background, which makes this a really sweet deal if you want to go the route. So what's very important about this? If you are using a WordPress site and it's growing or you want multiple sites, if you're doing e-commerce, if you're doing membership sites, if you're a business and you're running ads, if you're a developer and you want to develop software and develop websites and all that stuff, V is something you should seriously consider. It gives a good combination of performance and cost, and it also gives you a lot more control than a shared hosting environment would give you. It's really a really good compromise, and for many people it's exactly what they need. So what's really good about it too, is that if you have what's called a managed VPN, your hosting company maintains it. You don't have to worry about all that other stuff. It provides security patches, it'll monitor your server, it'll do backup management and all that stuff. This is for people who say, look, I got a business to run, I don't need to, and I don't want to be a system administrator. I just want somebody to manage this for me, and I'll take it from there. And that's the best combination you could possibly have for small or even a medium sized business.
[00:11:47] Yeah. And if you're a super geek and you want the cheapest prices and you can run it yourself if you want to, but what I don't want you to do is, um, not back this up somewhere else, okay? Always. No matter what you do with your website. And a lot of them brag. Oh, we do backups for you. Well, guess what? If they get hacked or they go down. Your backups don't mean anything because they got lost also. So you want to always back up your sites somewhere else. And don't trust just one online entity to, uh, to keep it. Because you could lose everything at once if they go bankrupt or if they get hacked really bad. Uh, so so don't none of this stuff, you just say, oh, well, this is the only place I'm going to keep it.
[00:12:40] Right, exactly. So. So the watchword here. And Tom's absolutely right. We have his server and all our websites and everything else backed up three different ways. We have it backed up. If the server fails because it's a piece of hardware, you know, eventually something could go wrong and the actual physical hardware just fails. We have that fully backed up. We have all the websites backed up two different ways in two different locations. So the unless the world just explodes, they we have backup somewhere.
[00:13:10] Could it could it's it's working on it. Yeah.
[00:13:12] Yeah. Exactly. Uh, but regardless of what happens, we can always retrieve the information necessary to recreate the websites and get back online and back to business. And that's probably.
[00:13:24] The most.
[00:13:24] Important thing that you can do.
[00:13:27] All right, so it's called a VPN. You can just Google it. Vpns, prices and find stuff. You can look for reviews on them. But uh, it's something that if you're growing, uh, it's uh, it's going to be cheaper than jumping all the way to a dedicated server. And, uh, there you go. So thanks, Larry, for making that so clear. I love that condo analogy.
[00:13:49] Yeah, I think it's great, even though I don't own a condo. But I know I understand the analogy. It's, uh, let me put a slash there. Condo slash co-op. Yeah. Same thing.
[00:13:58] Yeah. So, um, awesome. So folks Decide or talk to your own geeks or decide, hey, am I getting a lot of traffic? Am I growing? Is this the next step for me so that you know, because if you are growing, the last thing you want to do is have your website slow down because, uh, Google came out years ago, five years ago and said it must load lightning fast and don't believe what you see. Oh, I clicked on my website. It loaded instantly. That's because it was cached in your browser and it's going to load for you perfectly. But for a new visitor, if it takes a few extra seconds to load, they're gone.
[00:14:42] That's that's actually.
[00:14:43] The.
[00:14:43] Sign.
[00:14:43] Of death.
[00:14:44] Honestly.
[00:14:45] Absolutely.
[00:14:45] People don't want to wait anymore. So you gotta make sure that that's in place and working fast.
[00:14:50] I personally can, uh, scroll 3000 TikToks in less than 30s.
[00:14:56] So that's some kind of a record, isn't it?
[00:14:59] Well, I don't know if it's a record, but that's the way the world is now, so. Okey doke. Well thanks so much, Larry. So folks check out great internet marketing training. Com if you want one on one time with me Larry, Marc, Travis uh, even Jennifer if you want. So, check it out. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to my school at IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. And it's certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. So check it out and save yourself a couple hundred thousand bucks by going to a four year indoctrination school. All right. So and have a skill that's in high demand, either working for somebody else, having your own business or both. All right. Thanks a lot, Larry. And we'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.