Shared Hosting vs. VPS Hosting

Shared Hosting vs. VPS Hosting
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It is important to choose a proper web hosting plan while planning to start a website. You can host your content on the website through various types of hosting like shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud. 

Shared hosting is like living in an apartment where you share a common space with your neighbors. You cannot customize anything but you share maintenance cost and responsibility with your neighbors. Shared hosting is very cheap and the most commonly used method of hosting, and is used for customers who have chosen trial or low-cost hosting packages.

You can opt for a Shared hosting if you fall in any of the following categories:

Having limited low budget.
Expecting a low initial rate of visitors say 200 per day.
Limited number of email accounts is enough.
Planning to host and maintain only small number of web sites.

Advantages of Shared Hosting

It a good option if you have a limited number of blogs and smaller websites as it is easy to maintain.
It has an economical advantage.
Technical maintenance of the server is not required, therefore you do not need a special skill set to handle your website.
You can demand for extra storage space.
All kinds of software, including virtualized software can be installed.

Disadvantages of Shared hosting

Limited number of resources.
Your website performance may be affected by other websites hosted on the shared server.
You might have to face long term problems with scalability and backup.
There is a possibility to face security issues for sharing a common server.
You might have to configure firewall settings for certain applications.
You will have a limited customer support only.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting is like living in a simplex or half-plex where you can customize everything to your own tastes. However, you still need to maintain your own area. Companies that deal with resource heavy applications and secured data most often use VPS.

Technically, VPS servers are actually still “shared” environments (in as much as there will still be more than one user running on the same physical machine) but the technology used to assign resources and keep users separate is much more sophisticated.

Allocating resources per-user makes for a much more stable and predictable environment. 

Expansion of your business beyond shared hosting level.
Expectation for a significant increase in traffic over the next few months.
Plans to work with confidential secured data in your business.
Intention to increase headcount which in turn requires a greater email capacity.
Plan to host multiple sites, blogs or different applications very soon.

Advantages of VPS Hosting

You will have a huge space and bandwidth which enables you to do what you like.
You can upgrade or downgrade your subscription at any time.
You can configure anything you wish on the server as you own it.
Run your own batch files to create multiple services inside the server using shell access.
You can avail an extensive and dedicated 24/7 Customer Support which will help you have better security levels.
You can have easy scalability and backup in this method.
User partitioning enables you to custom firewall configurations.

Disadvantages of VPS Hosting

You need a dedicated system administrator to take care of your server.
It is usually costly so you should be careful with cheap offers.
You must be particular with certain applications as they might have issues running in a virtualized environment.

Shared hosting and VPS hosting have a lot of differences as listed below:

Resources: Shared hosting will have access to a limited number of resources only while the VPS hosting allows private disk spaces, having greater resource availability.
Security: Shared hosting is comparatively less secure than VPS hosting.
Platform: Shared hosting provides a basic level of file system and compartmentalization.

You can move from Shared hosting to VPS hosting in any of the following cases:

You want to be more serious in your business web hosting. Your website is consuming all your processors.
Your website is gobbling your CPU and RAM resources.
You feel the need for complete control.
You need more email accounts or hosting more websites.
You are looking for better performance and stability.
You feel that you are ready to rise above the rest.
You want to expand the existing performance level.
You want to customize the appearance and settings.