Shared Hosting vs. VPS Hosting: Which One is the Best for Your Small Business?

Today, we get everything required at our doorstep with just a click of button. This may include food, groceries, clothes, etc. From this, one thing is clear that even you need to have your web presence. You should have a website for your business or else you won’t be visible to a larger audience. This will impact your identity and also, affect your sales. Your competitors will earn more than you as they have an online presence. 

When you are planning to start your new website project, you need to select a right hosting provider and surely that’s a tough task. Not only you, but also the experienced web developers find it hard to select a good web hosting provider since there are plenty of hosting company offering different kinds of services and features.

Before you select a web host, it is important to decide on the type of hosting you need. 

In this article, you will get to see 2 types of web hosting which confuse you when you are hosting your first website. Each of them comes with its own distinct advantages and disadvantages, which one should know so that you can find which solution best matches your website’s needs.

Shared Hosting

The most popular option for newbies who are building their first website is shared hosting. 

When you select cheapest VPS hosting, your web hosting provider will place your website on a server that includes hundreds though not thousands of other websites. It means each customer will need to share the space as well as resources on the server with every other website hosted on the same server. The resources include memory, CPU time and disk space.

Shared hosting can be considered similar to travelling in a bus where you need to share the seats with other passengers. The seats are limited and so some of them even need to stand when there’s crowd. Also, it is the cheapest mode of transport.

Similarly, on a shared server you need to share the server space and resources with other users. But when there is an increase in traffic on one website, it will pull the resources of the complete server and other resources might get affected due to this.

Shared hosting is the cheapest and most economical option for newbies. But, in terms of resources it is strict and so, you get what you pay for.

Pros

• Shared hosting comes at cheap price which startup websites can easily buy at.
• It is easy to start with shared hosting for new websites in comparison to other hosting options.
• The web host will manage the security, upgrades and maintenance of the server.

Cons

• Since there are many other websites running on the same server, it might take long time for your web pages to load. It means shared hosting can be slow.
• There’s no guarantee of security. You don’t know the other users that are using the same server, so if one site faces a memory leak or is hacked, your site can get affected.
• You don’t have control over the server and performance. If the server gets overcrowded or if another website pulls up more than its share of resources, performance can get affected badly.
• You don’t get the ability to scale due to limited storage and bandwidth.

Best suited to

Shared hosting is best suitable for small websites that expect minimal traffic such as blogs and personal sites.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

VPS is somewhat similar to shared hosting. In VPS hosting, you need to share the server with other websites but the number of sites are less as compared to shared hosting. Also, the server is partitioned into different virtualized environments and so, each user gets dedicated resources and you can scale the resources when there’s a traffic spike.

You can take the example of an airplane. You need to travel with several passengers in an airplane. But each one gets dedicated food table, food, oxygen masks, etc.

Pros

• VPs hosting is highly affordable than a dedicated server.
• It is highly secured than shared hosting. For dividing the server properly, the host installs a layer of software that allocates a part of the server to you, making it completely separate from other customers.
• You get faster speed with cheapest VPS hosting in comparison to shared. You get allocated more resources than in shared hosting.
• Root server access is offered to every user. This helps you to make customizations for matching your needs and you get greater control over your hosting environment.
• It’s offers scalability of resources. A VPS can grow as per your site needs.

Cons

• There are some web hosts that oversell their servers, expecting that every site currently using the server won’t receive high traffic every day.
• It is expensive than shared hosting.
• In unmanaged VPS, you need to configure the server which might take longer to get your website up and running if you aren’t technically skilled.

Best suited to

In case shared hosting won’t cater your needs and you want allocated resources and greater control on your hosting environment, VPS hosting would be a right fit for you.

Conclusion

Selecting a web hosting plan completely depends on what are your expectations from the website. If you are just launching your website, shared hosting would be the better option. But if you expect high traffic on your website then it would be an intelligent decision to select a VPS hosting plan.