Web hosting is an essential part of setting up your website for your business. It entails making your website accessible on the internet through the world wide web from any part of the world. There are several types of web hosting services that you can think of–shared hosting, VPS, Dedicated hosting, etc. But what's important is having options at your beck and call so you can choose something befitting.
If you are just starting to think of setting up a website or probably redesigning your website, you will want to know the difference between hosting services available. With this, you can weigh the pros and cons available to you, and make accurate judgments based on what you want.
Two common hosting services you will consider is shared hosting and VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting. These hosting services have various characteristics–scalability, speed, security, price, bandwidth, etc, which you may want for your website. With these characteristics made bare, you can then decide on the one which satisfies your desires for a hosting service.
In this piece, we are going to make a comparison between shared hosting and VPS. But before we delve in, let's get to know what these two hosting services entail.
What Shared Hosting And VPS Entails
Shared Hosting as the name implies means that your website is sharing a hosting server with other websites. Simply put: you and other website owners are sharing a server provided by your host. For one thing, shared hosting can be a cheap option for you; this is because providers of shared hosting can serve many customers like you from one server. Another good thing is these host providers take care of things like maintenance, security, and configuration. However, you don't have resource control. Plus the bandwidth is small.
On the other hand, VPS hosting is a step higher. Here you share the physical server with other website owners as well. But you have a dedicated resource control given to you as a user. You have more bandwidth, management flexibility, storage capacity, etc. With VPS you don't have to worry about your website speed slowing down as a result of other users; you have a dedicated resource control that gives you room for your website to grow. Irrespective of these mouth-watering benefits, VPS hosting is quite expensive more than shared hosting. But it is also reasonable if you want more for your website.
Let's examine the comparison between these two.
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Performance: People who visit your website expect it to load up in less than two seconds. If your website is slow to load up, you will struggle to have a huge number of visitors. Performance is a key factor in choosing the right hosting plan because just a few seconds of website downtime can decide whether people will do business with you or not.
Comparatively, a VPS hosting plan is always faster than a shared hosting plan. VPS hosting has more processing power and computing resources than shared hosting. As a result, a website hosted under VPS is faster and is more likely for customer conversation with a business website. Shared hosting is suitable for small website owners. On the other hand, a business-inclined website that focuses on revenue growth would do well with VPS.
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Security: If your website involves a lot of user data or one where users have to make payments, submitting their information, you should understand that the security of this information is not to be trivialized.
Shared hosting is more likely susceptible to security breaches because of the number of websites connected to it. The more website there is, the more likely for security attacks. The level of security breach depends on what the hosting provider has invested in their shared host services.
For VPS, security is far better than shared hosting. There's a robust security feature that is monitored by professionals with a lot of experience. You don't need to be bothered about security breaches with VPS. Then again, this depends on the website you have in mind.
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Reliability And Stability: When we talk about reliability and stability, we are talking about how well your hosting server will be up and running, such that people visiting your website wouldn't have an issue. This can also be described as your website uptime, always expressed in percentages.
Shared hosting would have issues with uptime because of server overload I.e, more websites using one server per time. VPS hosting on the other hand is less likely susceptible to reliability and stability issues. This is because you have your dedicated bandwidth and other controlled resources. You wouldn't bother about having overload server issues.
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Scalability: There's a tendency for your website to grow, such that there will be a need for you to scale up, to accommodate this growth. This is a major deciding factor when considering between a VPS or shared hosting. Aspects like storage and server capacity go with scalability. For example, with shared hosting, you can get up to 10,000 visitors a month. But with time, this number could be more, and thus shared hosting may not be convenient anymore. A VPS hosting would be the better option because it offers room for growth and scalability.
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Price: Working with a budget in setting up a website is important. We examined previously that VPS hosting is relatively more expensive than shared hosting. This is because for shared hosting the cost is usually split among the many users using the shared server. Shared hosting is quite economical if you are considering having a small website, where you're not doing much. But when you're thinking business with rapid growth, and where you can get so much customization, performance, and resource control, VPS would do. Then again, it depends on your budget.
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Customization: VPS gives you more resource control. This means you can have a lot of control over things like the software you can install to customize and optimize your website and make it work according to how you want it. Shared hosting doesn't offer such resources control. It has a lot of restrictions as compared to VPS. However, with VPS you don't want to overdo customization so as not to delete an important program that is needed for your site to function well.
Conclusion
Having juxtaposed both hosting options to you, choosing one out of the two should be easy for you. Put into consideration your budget, the type of website you want, your type of business, and more importantly the future of your business. Alternatively, you can just start with shared hosting, and grow into using VPS as your business grow.