Your presence in the world of the internet become necessary nowadays especially if you want to build a business and brand for yourself.
Depending on the nature of your activity and its size, the website through which you will be in contact with your actual and expected clients can be determined.
There are many types of hosting, but our main concern in this article will be Shared and VPS hosting. The question is, are you going to choose the shared hosting or VPS hosting server?
A lot of details are coming in this article which can help you to decide which type of web hosting you should choose for your website Shared hosting or VPS.
But first, let’s define them both.
Read all types of web hosting and how to choose one.
What is Shared Hosting?
A shared web hosting can be defined as a service in which many websites remain on the same server that is connected to the internet.
Sharing a host is like renting one room in a shared house. You share the resources such as the storage space and RAMs, with other websites. One server may host many websites and the number of hosted websites can vary.
Shared hosting is an economical choice for hosting. So instead of paying the whole cost of hosting individually, many websites will participate in holding out the cost together.
The most valuable advantage of shared hosting is when your budget is limited. More money can be saved by sharing the same host with other websites because you will share space with them so hosts will offer low prices for customers.
By using shared hosting, you can emphasize your presence effectively online at a minimum paid cost.
What is VPS Hosting?
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) is a hosting services in which virtual technology is to be used to give a private resource on a multi-user server. The VPS is installed on a physical machine that is working by a hosting provider which runs many VPSs.
VPS is like renting a flat in a building (server). You get a private space with dedicated resources on a shared CPU.
The physical server is shared in the VPS with different participants but each one of them has a definite set of resources.
By comparing the VPS with shared hosting we can say that VPS is more reliable, secure, and stable in performance when you do not have dedicated server space.
Although the VPS is more expensive in return more flexibility is offered. So based on your objectives, which means hosting your website can be chosen.
Read, what to look for in a web hosting service.
Now let’s compare each of them to see what exactly is better for whom.
Performance
Web hosting performance is an important factor when choosing a web hosting provider, is the measure of how well a web server performs in delivering content to web browsers.
The performance of a web host can be measured by its uptime, load time, and server response time.
The performance and speed of shared hosting are affected by the shared server infrastructure as well as the activity of other websites that are hosted within the same server.
If we take the performance as a point of comparison to evaluate the productivity of shared hosting and VPS, It is obvious to say that, VPS wins.
It is important to tell that the performance is more reliable when VPS is selected since more resources are available for use.
Security
Web hosting security is a measure of how secure a web hosting company is. It’s important to choose a web host with good security so that your site doesn’t get hacked and your data is compromised.
When it is time to talk about security, we will find that in shared hosting compromised sites can affect the security of your website.
If one of the websites is attacked by hackers, some of your data may be stolen. Shared hosting is more susceptible to cyber-attacks.
On other hand, we can define VPS with its high securing level compared to shared hosting because the hosting environment in the VPS is isolated and separated from the best websites on the same server.
But that doesn’t mean that Shared hosting is not secured at all, but using VPS is more safe and more secure.
Scalability
A scalable web hosting provider is one that can handle any kind of traffic, from small and personal websites to large and popular ones. It does this by providing the necessary resources for your website to grow in size as your traffic increases.
When you’re looking for a web hosting provider, you should make sure that they have scalability in their offerings. This means that they can provide enough resources for your website so it doesn’t go down when it’s experiencing an increase in traffic.
Shared hosting may only be scaled up to increase the bandwidth and storage. The scalability is limited here. VPS is the best choice if your website is supposed to receive a lot of visitors.
Using shared hosting, in this case, will give your visitors an error message because the shared hosting cannot manage to handle that load of traffic.
VPS can easily be scaled up. Any extra resources can be added or modified simply. VPS can grow as long as your small business keeps growing.
Reliability
Web hosting reliability is a measure of how often web hosts are unavailable to serve webpages. It’s an important measurement because it can have a significant impact on your website’s usability and success.
A web host that is up and running is able to serve content quickly and reliably, while a web host that goes down will be unavailable for some period of time.
A reliable web hosting company should provide you with multiple points of presence (POP) in different geographic locations around the world. This way, if one POP goes down for some reason, the other one will still be available for visitors to access your site.
When this happens, visitors to your site will see an error message instead of the content you intended them to see.
Each website has its quota in the shared hosting system. so if every site used its specified quota and increase it from the quota of others, then the shared hosting would not work efficiently.
So the reliability of shared hosting here is affected by many probabilities.
VPS is very reliable by most companies and is preferred over shared hosting because you are allocating your bandwidth. VPS is fast and this is one of the main reasons that make companies prefer to choose it.
Prices
The prices of web hosting services are very different from one provider to another. For example, you can find a plan that costs $2 and one that costs $150.
The cost of web hosting services is determined by the features offered by the provider, the market prices, and your budget.
Shared hosting can be accepted as a selection for beginners with limited starting plans and a limited budget.
Free hosting services are existing but they will never be as strong as paid services. Both shared hosting and VPS will cost you money but the VPS is more expensive than shared hosting because more resources are offered.
The increase in cost is logical because when you are sharing a host the total cost will be divided to be paid by all participants, while VPS gives more choices with more range of resources to select from them according to your needs.
Configuration and Customization
Web hosting configuration and customization is the process of configuring a web host or server to suit the specific needs of a website.
The process can be as simple as changing the name of the site’s administrator account or changing domain names, and it can involve more complex tasks such as adding new features or accessing server files, and changing codes.
Shared hosting does not allow server customization because any change will be applied to all websites on the same shared server. But they allow some simple customization options on their platforms.
On the other hand, VPS hosting makes a virtual environment that looks like a dedicated server environment. So, you get full control over your server to configure and customize it.
For beginners who don’t know much about configuration and customization, it’s better for them to go with shared hosting, as it doesn’t require any server configuration.
In VPS hosting, we can divide it into two types: Managed web hosting plans and Unmanaged web hosting plans.
- The managed plans:
are a type of web hosting service that is managed by the provider. The provider manages the server and provides customer support for the customer’s site.
The benefits of a managed web hosting plan include having an expert managing your website, an expert to provide customer support, and having someone else to take care of all the server maintenance. The best choice for managed hosting providers is Cloudways.
- The un-managed plans:
Unmanaged web hosting plans are often considered to be more affordable than managed ones because they require less work from the webmaster.
However, when using unmanaged web hosting servers, you are responsible for configuring, running, and maintaining the servers. The best choice for managed hosting providers is Vultr.
Shared vs VPS: Which is Better for you?
Before we show you what web hosting is best for what type of website, let’s make a small table summarizing all the information we talked about
| Comparison | Shared Hosting | VPS |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Cheap | Reasonable |
| Price Range | $2/month | $5/month |
| Performance | Good | Better |
| Speed | Not fast | Fast |
| Uptime | Good | Good |
| Security | Secured | More secured |
| Reliability | Good | Better |
| Customization | No | Yes |
| Configuration | Easier | Easy |
| For | Beginners | Advanced |
| Best web host | Hostinger | Vultr |
From the previous pool of information, we can pick up some important points to summarize this article as follows:
If your website is small or brand new with a limited financial budget such as portfolio websites, then it is good to start with a shared hosting service because it offers you all your requirements at this level.
But if your business is big or getting bigger and a lot of traffic is expected on your website, here using VPS will make sense. VPS gives a wide range of options that can be modified to cover the needs of every stage your growing business is passing through.
VPS is best for medium-large businesses because it offers a balance of both flexibility and adaptability that supposes to be desired by every growing project.
Big blogs that have a considerable flow of traffic will prefer the VPS servers because of the high flexibility that is shown by them.
What web host should you choose?
For Shared hosting, the best choice is Hostinger. It’s a cheap and reliable service. For only $2 per month, you can get your website running on their servers.
Fro Unmanaged VPS hosting option, Vultr is the One to go with, they provide fantastic services with powerful plans. Only $5 every month can handle your needs on their platform.
Additional choice for those who need Managed VPS servers, Cloudways will provide you with a cloud VPS server that they fully manage, and you can host as many websites as you need on that server for only $10 a month.
