The differences between VPS and shared hosting

Don’t worry if you feel confused or overwhelmed when it comes to choosing the right hosting solution for your website, as this is perfectly natural. With so many different options to choose from, such as high-performance SSD VPS and super cheap shared hosting, as well as the extensive advantages of today’s online world waiting to be capitalised on, you will want to pick the right one first time around. 

But by looking at the differences between two common choices – VPS and shared hosting – making your mind up should be a lot easier. 

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most affordable and by association, the most popular way to host a website online. This is because your website will be hosted on the same several as a number of other websites. 

As a result, every site is vying for exactly the same resources on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. Unfortunately, this means that shared hosting sites tend to be rather slow or are sometimes not available at all. 

VPS

VPS or Virtual Private Servers on the other hand will still put your website on exactly the same server as others, but they work in a very different way.

Instead of the ‘first come, first serve’ model adopted by shared hosting, VPS gives each website a specific section of the server. Therefore, instead of battling it out with others, you will be allocated your own exclusive resources. 

The pros and cons of shared hosting

While shared hosting has an economic advantage over the alternatives and is a good option for smaller sites that don’t want the burden of technical maintenance, the benefits end there. 

Due to the limited number of resources available, your website will suffer from poor performance and slow loading times. There are also big security concerns with sharing a common server, not to mention configuring your own firewall settings for certain applications.

Also, it is quite a short-term solution, as problems with scalability and backup will soon arrive. Because you are low down on your provider’s priority list, customer support could be an issue too. 

The pros and cons of VPS

Although VPS is typically more expensive than shared hosting and could require the assistance of a dedicated systems administrator, it is a much better option in every single way.

Huge space and bandwidth enables you to do whatever you like without having to worry about speed or availability. You will also be able to scale up or down at a moment’s notice and easily backup all of your important data. 

Seeing as you own the server, you can configure anything you wish too, such as user partitioning for custom firewall configurations or running your own batch files to create multiple services. Dedicated customer support will never be too far either.

VPS vs. shared hosting

Although shared hosting is a perfectly acceptable solution for basic blogs and simple websites, the only way you will be able to grow and expand online with high performance and superior reliability is by choosing Virtual Private Servers.