VPS - What Is Guaranteed And Burstable RAM

With VPS web hosting you will often see specifications on web hosting websites like Guaranteed RAM and Burstable RAM and may be wondering what this means.

Well when you see Guaranteed RAM it means that with the plan that you choose that you will have a guaranteed amount, so for example you may have Guaranteed RAM of 256MB, so you know that this is pretty much yours to use, but should your website/s receieve a bit of a spike then you can safely use the Burstable RAM, you dont have to do anything specific to use the Burstable RAM, it will be setup that way, and an example of available Burstable RAM could be 1GB.

Its not uncommon for a website to get a bit of a spike of activity and so the Burstable RAM helps your website deal with this, but at the web host that you choose, they most likely would not allow your website/s to go into the Burstable RAM and be using it constantly.

If your website/s hosted on the VPS server are beginning to use the resources more heavily and constantly then the web host would probably contact you suggesting that you upgrade to the next level VPS plan that they may offer or to a dedicated hosting plan if they offer that.

The Burstable RAM is sort of like a safety net to deal with a sudden overflow of resource use that is more than your Guaranteed RAM, just as long as you dont constantly eat into it then its fine to temporarily have your websites use beyond your Guaranteed RAM amount specified.

The use of the Burstable RAM will depend on the availability of resources on the server that your VPS account is on, as a number of VPS servers will be sharing one box, so as long as its available on the server then its there for you to temporarily use.