Dedicated vs. Cloud Hosting

When searching for a quality web host for your website, email or company infrastructure, you will likely need to select a type of hosting plan. Among the most common types of hosting are shared, dedicated, VPS and cloud. Each of these hosting methods have their pros and cons, so it’s wise to select the proper hosting plan for your particular website or deployment.

Did you know: A power website like Facebook is estimated to have approximately 60,000 servers. A basic shared hosting plan, which the majority of websites run on, includes one server that provides hosting for many websites.

Using the following, basic web hosting guide, you can learn more about how the popular web hosting options work, and hopefully choose a great hosting option for your particular website or hosting needs.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting plans are among the most popular of all web hosting options, due to affordability and price. Most web hosts offer basic shared plans starting around $5.00 USD a month, give or take.

Shared hosting plans

With a shared hosting plan, your website, email or other deployment is hosted on a server that is shared by others who have similar shared hosting plans. This allows hosting companies to offer shared hosting for cheap prices, as these hosting plans do not require their own dedicated machine per customer. Multiple shared hosting plans can be deployed from a single server and even a single instance.

Additionally, this hosting option requires the least amount of core maintenance, as most hosts may assign a unique or rotating administrator to their customers with shared hosting plans. This administrator not only keeps the system up-to-date, but also provides routine, admin level root maintenance tasks.

Shared hosting plans are not necessarily slower than VPS or cloud hosting plans, although most shared plans are not as fast as dedicated servers. Much of the speed of a shared hosting plan is determined by the other shared plans that are hosted on a particular server.

For example, if you purchase a shared hosting plan for your blog, your blog will obviously be hosted alongside several other websites, blogs or deployments on the same server. If another shared website on your server gets a traffic spike or high amount of website visits, than the distribution of server speed may effect the other shared plans on the particular server. Thus, your website may become slower.

What are the advantages of shared hosting?

1. Cheap
2. Managed by an Administrator
3. Unlimited bandwidth
4. Unlimited storage
5. Simple to use, learn and operate

What are the disadvantages of shared hosting?

1. Managed by an Administrator
2. Limited speed
3. Not great for websites or deployments that get a lot of traffic
4. Less security than other options because deployment is stored on the same server in the same hosting manager as other shared hosting customers. If someone gains access to the root level hosting of a hosting manager, they have access to all shared plans that are deployed from that instance.

Who should use shared hosting plans?

Low to medium traffic websites and blogs are ideal for shared hosting plans, along with websites that have few webpages, or portfolios, etc…

VPS Hosting

VPS, or virtual private server hosting plans are considered to be a step up from shared plans, but not as advanced as dedicated servers. Most web hosts offer VPS plans ranging from $25.00 USD per month to $250.00 USD per month, give or take.

VPS hosting plans

With a VPS hosting plan, your website may not necessarily have its own unique machine/server. However, you still retain many of the benefits of having a unique machine/server, because most VPS plans are deployed via virtual machines.

With a shared hosting plan, mentioned above, you share a server with other shared hosting plans and are managed by an administrator. With a VPS hosting plan, you may share a machine/server with others, but your deployment is unique and you are for the most part, the administrator.

Consider it like this, you may run VMware or Parallels on your personal computer so that you can deploy other operating systems. A VPS hosting plan is similar. A computer or server utilizing VPS may have virtualization software installed, in which you are assigned your own deployment, or your own virtual machine or host manager software.

This lets you manage more aspects of your deployment, and most hosting providers also allow VPS users root access and management.

However, because one machine/server may be host to several VMs (virtual machines), VPS hosting, in a way, is shared hosting.

What are the advantages of VPS hosting?

• Offers most features of a dedicated server, at a reduced price.
• Managed by you, but many VPS hosting providers offer assistance and support for VPS customers.
• Scalable to different plans, for increased or decreased usage or website traffic.
• Usually more assigned speed with set server specs. VPS plans give you a defined amount of CPU, RAM, Disk space and bandwidth.

What are the disadvantages of VPS hosting?

• Managed by you or your administrator. More complex and greater learning curve than shared hosting.
• Shared on server.
• Limited bandwidth.
• Limited storage.
• Limited resources.

Who should use VPS hosting?

Many low traffic websites and mid traffic websites alike use VPS hosting. It’s significantly more affordable than a dedicated server, while still providing root level access and self administration. However, it’s not as powerful as a dedicated server, because it’s a shared server deployment.

Thank you for stopping by the site for today’s post. I hope that for anyone new to web servers and hosting, you may have learned more about how shared and VPS hosting works. Be sure to stop by the site for our next post, where we will cover cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and some other details regarding web hosts.

Dedicated vs. Cloud Hosting

Reference : http://www.online-tech-tips.com