The difference in shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers.
These days a company without a website is like a bar with no beer. Highly unusual and missing out on major marketing opportunities. Companies, either large of small, have long since learned of the advantages of having their own web site, mad these days, the costs are such that putting together a web design and production package as well as finding a suitable domain name as well as an efficient and competitively priced hosting service is far away from being the expensive exercise that it was even a few years ago.
In web hosting, it is very much a case of horses for courses and if you fall upon or are recommended to a reputable hosting company, they should be able to advise you which of the three choices of hosting packages are most suitable for you. Shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers are the three major choices in web hosting, each with their own pluses and minuses. In this article we will try and explain which of these options might best suit your company.
As its title description implies shared hosting describes a hosting account that shares the same server with several other web sites. This number can range from the tens to the hundreds. The advantage of shared hosting is that it generally a lot less expensive than any other form of server. This form of hosting is particularly efficient for web sites with low traffic or companies who are providing information only. The majority of web sites hosted on shared servers fall into this category, and only in the most unusual of cases do they hit heavy traffic. The obvious disadvantage of this option is that if the server does become overcrowded then the speed of access for the site can drop considerably. As we all know the average web surfer has miniscule patience for web sites that take more ten seconds to open, and will move on to the next web site on the search engine, which will probably not be yours. If you anticipate a lot of traffic on your web site, then the chances are that shared hosting is not for you. Any money that you save in hosting charges will be more than offset by the losses in potential sales caused by sluggish download time.
At one time the only alternative for web site owners who had anticipated heavy traffic in advance or whose success has outweighed their initial projections and were beginning to hit some heavy traffic on their sites was a dedicated server. This was an alternative that every scrap of traffic that hit their website would download almost instantaneously. These companies knew that by leasing an entire serve of their own; all the incoming traffic went directly to their web sites. The major disadvantage was that leasing or purchasing their own dedicated server put their web hosting costs into an entirely different financial stratosphere. The company again had to way up the pros and cons of the situation. with many of them taking the plunge into leasing or buying their own server, and just as many taking cold feet and continuing to host their web sites on shared servers as they were unable or unwilling to justify the considerable cost increases involved in moving to a dedicated server.
In recent years an intermediate option has been increasingly on offer from most of the professional web hosting companies. Known as a Virtual Private Server or VPS this is an option that provides a “best of both Worlds” situation at a considerably reduced cost from a dedicated server. A VPS can host an unlimited number of domains, contain its own set of scripts as well as providing the same wide range of hosting facilities only found on a dedicated server, under its own IP address and network connections.
What can make the VPS alternative a major attraction for medium to large size web sites, particularly those operating in the business to consumer sector, is that the hosting company only charges for the bandwidth, memory and disc space that the web site uses. This is an ideal, flexible situation with considerable cost savings with deprecating security levels, flexibility and performance.
A VPS server operates in a very simple fashion. The hosting company partitions a physical server into a number of smaller units that can be “rented” out as a package. Each package contains its own applications, with all the characteristics of a dedicated server. The beauty of VPS is that it allows users speed and efficiency at a considerably reduced cost than that of a dedicated server.
With more and more web sites establishing themselves with the sole intention of handling high volume traffic, the VPS has proved to be extremely popular. This form of “scalable” solution seems to solve the problem for web sites in this category and looks capable of doing so for many more in the future.