WestHost VPS – A little bit of history

In August 2003, we launched our first VPS hosting platform (2.0). It was our goal to give current and prospective clients more control and features within their hosting account and still maintain a price point typically found in traditional shared hosting. At the time, the market definition of “VPS hosting” was still largely undefined. Many aspects of the offering qualified as what was know as VPS hosting, but one drawback was the fact our offering did not offer full root access. We chose to proceed by naming our offering VPS as full root access was not a consistent requirement at the time.

Fast forward to 2007 and the market definition of VPS is much more defined. True root access is now a primary requirement. When we launched our new 3.0 hosting platform this spring, there was discussion about changing the naming for this very reason. For better or worse we have chosen to hold off with any naming changes until we launch a high-end, root access VPS offering of our own. We still try to educate our clients up-front that WestHost’s VPS hosting does not offer true root access as shown here. We also try to make it clear of the benefits of our platform over traditional shared Web hosting. When you factor in the capabilities of a WestHost VPS, our reliability, support and the price-point, it’s still one of the best values out there, especially when you factor in the new enhancements of our 3.0 platform.