What is the difference between Web Hosting and VPS?
Web Hosting is also called Shared Hosting. To put it a simple way, Shared hosting means your site uses the same server as many other sites. It’s typically the cheapest option but comes with limited capabilities in bandwidth, administration, and performance.
VPS hosting is a more premium option, with greater customization and performance capability. But you will have to pay more, as with any premium service, to get more. Next, when choosing between shared and VPS hosting we’ll cover the key points to consider.
Privacy and Security
In a shared hosting environment, usually, there is more risk of security breaches mainly because there are more websites and more sites create more opportunities for attackers. Additionally, shared hosting customers are typically the least experienced with precautions about web hosting, which means that your hosting neighbors may cause server vulnerabilities.
With VPS hosting, security is more under your power than with shared hosting. You also get the company to provide better security features. For more robust safety features that are only available through VPS hosting, you can guarantee the security of your site. If your company needs to secure personal data, it’s worth considering the upgrade to a VPS.
Speed and Performance
As you guess, more resources imply more performance. Shared hosting is only as effective as speed technologies implemented by your host. As with any shared plan, other websites that affect the performance of your website, it is the risk that you run by opting for the more cost-effective shared hosting plan.
A VPS hosting plan will almost always be faster than a shared hosting plan simply because your users don’t have to make queues of visitors from other sites to access yours. When you have to handle high traffic demands or multiple sites, the best solution is VPS. With a VPS, you usually have more control over the performance factor.
Server Resources
As the name suggests you share resources with the other sites on your server on a shared hosting plan. If one website uses too much bandwidth, then all the other websites suffer. A VPS lies a bunch of slices of the same server in the gray area in the middle acting as their own dedicated hardware entities.
For VPS hosting, you’ll enjoy more private disk space and greater overall availability of resources. When you want to extend your company and have to give customers a user experience that goes beyond the simply shared hosting standard, this would be important. You will also receive root access through the server environment, which essentially means you can install additional software and edit any file on the server.
Reliability and Stability
When we’re talking about a web host availability we don’t test their calendar or relationship status. Rather, we discuss how often you would expect your website to run properly, and how often it does not load due to server or networking issues. This directly correlates with a server’s uptime, or how much it’s up and running. Uptime is listed as a percentage, and anything 99.9% and above is generally considered excellent.
There are several websites in a shared hosting network that could potentially overload the server. A VPS resides in an independent hosting environment and therefore there is no concern as to whether other accounts can affect your site access.
Scalability
Shared hosting is a great option for the short term, depending on how your website grows, you may face scalability issues in the long run. If you find your storage capabilities are being maxed out, or if user demand exceeds server space, you may need to consider scaling up to eke out better performance.
VPS hosting will expand with you; if you’re a small business, you get the leeway from paying a few bucks extra a month at this stage. VPS hosting customizable features allow you to scale faster and easier. If you predict that you will eventually have to scale up on the fly to satisfy demand, the investment in VPS hosting will now pay off in the future.
Server Administration
When you want to host your website on a shared server, the server needed at your end would be little to no technical maintenance. This means you can enjoy simple server administration at no additional cost to your budget or precious time for your website. It is a huge plus for many because no dedicated system administrator is needed.
VPS hosted websites are often more resource management complex, and therefore usually require a specific system administrator to focus on server maintenance. The tradeoff is that while increasing performance and security, you’ll be able to customize your site and configure whatever applications and software you want.
Configuration and Customizations
Configuration of your hosting is usually taken care of for you. The configuration is all sorted by your provider on shared hosting plans, so you can get more important things. VPS is much more complex. There are two different types of VPS hosting types: Managed VPS and Unmanaged VPS. Managed plans are the same as shared hosting, except that you are responsible for the set-up process. For Unmanaged, it’s up to you – developers and experts prefer to use this only.
There is a clear difference between the two types of hosting when it comes to customization. Let’s use your mobile plan as another example, to illustrate. Although shared hosting has limitations that you can’t reach, such as call minutes and data amount, VPS hosting allows you to customize your plan, so you can change your limitations on a monthly basis.
Managed Services
So far we have been talking about what constitutes shared servers and virtual private servers, but we still have to talk about who manages them. Shared servers are most frequently managed, ensuring that the hosting provider’s professional employees must ensure that the servers are maintained and protected. Shared hosting technicians use a relatively loose concept of managed services to assist with activities such as migrations, backups, tracking, updates, and maintenance.
A VPS may either be managed or unmanaged, with the latter referring to a service where the organization only assists with server or network issues, the client is responsible for the installation and maintenance of software installations and configurations.
Pricing
With shared hosting, you defray the costs associated with running and maintaining a server, because you share server space with thousands of other websites. Shared hosting is the most economical choice from a pure price point, and is a great option for those seeking to host a site with standard features.
A more costly plan provides more premium features, as with any paying service, and the same rings are valid for VPS hosting. If you want to improve the performance of your website, or if you need to increase online services for your business, VPS hosting will give you better options for customization and performance than shared hosting.
There’s no real argument if you want to host your website on the cheap since shared hosting is undeniably cheaper than VPS hosting. However, it’s still important to note that shared hosting for sites with big ambitions is a little limited.