Today the number of alternatives to choose a place to host your website has increased considerably and it becomes very complex to make the decision about which is the right option. Among all the alternatives we find two very popular: Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting.
If you are not very steeped in hosting technologies you will surely wonder what is the difference between these two services and what advantages or disadvantages would you find in each one. In this post I will try to answer this question so that you can make the best decision.
Shared Hosting
A shared hosting service is similar to dorm rooms. In many of these dormitories each of the students has their private room in which they keep their personal things and have their own space. However each of them must share building resources among all the students who live there. Both the bathrooms, as well as the electricity and the kitchen are resources that must be taken care of together with the others.
Choosing the right hosting service it depends on many factors, including resource needs, expected performance, security requirements, costs, server management preferences, and projected growth of the web.
Shared Hosting is a way for companies to put many clients on a single server. A server is like a desktop computer but much more powerful. If you have ever shared your computer with your family members then you will surely know what I am talking about.
One of the advantages achieved with this system is the considerable decrease in costs. If we return to the example of the family, buying a computer for each member is extremely expensive. However, if everyone uses the same computer, each one with its user, then the cost of that computer would be distributed among all the members of the family.
The disadvantage is that the resources are used by all users, therefore you can be affected by the use made of the computer by other people. For example, if your father starts uploading all the family photos from 10 years ago, the disk space could be reduced considerably, affecting the ability to install future applications.
A dedicated server for a single person can cost more than €300 per month. That is why companies, by placing hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of users on a single server, manage to reduce prices by up to €10 or even €1 or €2 depending on the recent promotions I have seen.
In this type of services you can’t expect high performance. If any one user’s application has a memory consumption issue, this issue would affect all sites hosted there. Even the malicious attacks that usually occur on this type of servers in a single website could affect all the websites hosted there. A problem that is very difficult to predict.
Let’s see an example
The hosting provider Hostinger It is one of the best known and most popular in the field of shared hosting. In general, a shared hosting plan looks like this:
Plans are usually offered based on the number of websites that can be hosted, in this case 1 or unlimited. Email accounts, bandwidth and some other outstanding feature are also specified. You can clearly see the low cost per month They have these types of plans.
Once the service is contracted, what we will see is a control panel (cPanel) where we can configure the website and its characteristics:
In this panel we can configure domains, email, databases, FTP accounts and more.
VPS Hosting
VPS is the acronym in English for Virtual Private Server (Virtual Private Server), and it is an alternative to shared hosting that is far superior in almost all aspects. Technically a VPS hosting is still “shared” (since there will still be multiple users using a single server) but the technology used to keep users isolated and more secure is much more sophisticated.
One of the most notable differences is that each environment is private, as if it were a server for each of them. And also far fewer users use a single physical server.
In shared hosting there is no planning strategy for resource allocation. Each web application uses the resources available to it at will. If a web page takes over 80% of the server’s RAM, only 20% remains for other applications. Nevertheless, in a VPS hosting a portion is previously assigned of the resources available to each user. For example, if the VPS plan offers 2GB of RAM, only 32 users can be accommodated on a 64GB server (although these values are sometimes dynamic).
This type of resource management is much more efficient and It allows to have a more stable and predictable environment. Is the 2GB of the basic VPS plan not enough for you? Don’t worry, many of these services offer the possibility of increasing memory capacity at an additional cost.
A great advantage is that if a user badly programmed his web page and has memory consumption problems, this incident will not affect you in the least. Even if a site receives attacks, it is likely that you will not even notice it, since the security systems to maintain isolation are very advanced.
Let’s look at another example
clouding.io is a popular VPS hosting service in Spain. When we enter your web portal we will see the prices of the configurations:
They seem prices quite competitive in relation to shared hosting, but remember that these prices are base, and in the case of Clouding.io and other VPS providers, these prices vary according to the monthly consumption of resources and the characteristics of the virtual machine that we create. This can be seen in the configuration of the virtual machine that Clouding.io has:
As can be seen in the previous image, each detail that we add to the server adds a cost per hour (which can also be viewed per month).A complete service with receipts and other additional features it can easily exceed €30 per month.
Unlike shared hosting on a VPS, we will have a panel where we manage virtual machines (and not websites). In order to have a website we will have to create a virtual machine with an operating system and then within the operating system install the web server where we will host the page:
In the previous image we see that I have created a virtual machine with the Linux Debian operating system. Then I will have to connect through a remote Desktop to be able to install the necessary applications to have a web server. The hosting provider assigns me an IP address to be able to access my server remotely.
Is it essential to choose a VPS service?
I can answer you with a blunt YES. If you have an online store or a web page, then you should stay away from shared hosting. There are only two possibilities why you could stay in a shared hosting. the first is you budget and the second is that you have a web page with Low traffic and you don’t expect to grow too much in the future.
You will surely wonder why in a shared hosting you have many of the unlimited features (such as storage or traffic) while in a VPS hosting this is very limited.
At first glance this may seem true, however remember that all hosting providers that offer “unlimited” services have in their contracts (in fine print) a limitation policy. In these contracts it is usually specified that the type of information that is stored in its services must be suitable for a website, and you could not use it as a file repository (Google Drive style), or even if you are discovered uploading copyrighted content you will be penalized.
Another thing is traffic and bandwidth. A standard VPS service usually offers 1TB of bandwidth. This value means that on average you can have half a million visits per month. Something quite loose. If you get to have half a million visits on shared hosting then you will surely end up consuming a lot of resources and your website could be seen offline very often. That is why in these values I recommend hiring a VPS-hosting.
conclusion
The final decision rests with VPS Hosting, which is far superior to Shared hosting. The cheapest of the VPS is better than the most expensive of the shared hosting services. Shared environments are out of your control and can become a real headache.
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