Choosing a hosting plan is one of the most important decisions that a new business can make. It can have an impact on both short- and long-term online strategy, investment, scalability, and agility. Those looking for new hosting have a number of fundamental plan types to choose from: shared hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, and cloud hosting. Each has specific benefits and limitations, so it’s important to make the right choice.
Small and medium business that don’t expect the sort of site load that would require dedicated servers often choose between shared hosting and a virtual private server for their initial site development and launch. Both provide an excellent hosting platform in specific circumstances, and choosing between them is not always easy, so we’d like to help you to make the right decision.
Advantages Of Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the lowest cost option. As the name implies, each server hosts a number of different clients and they share the resources of that server between them.
Shared hosting is a great way to get a site up and running quickly with minimal investment. The cost of the hosting itself is low, and, because server management is handled by the hosting company, only minimal technical knowledge is required. Most shared hosting providers will install WordPress or a similar application at the click of a button. Shared hosting is perfect for low-traffic business sites and blogs.
However, if a site is expected to attract more than a small number of visitors daily, either at launch or in the future, shared hosting can be limiting. The resources that each shared hosting server has are limited and must be shared. Load spikes can cause a site to perform sub-optimally or use up its resource allocations quickly.
Shared hosting’s ease-of-use can also limit flexibility. Because multiple clients inhabit the same hosting environment and the server is configured to suit a wide range of requirements, it’s not possible to modify that environment for the needs of particular clients.
Advantages Of Virtual Private Servers
As with shared hosting, multiple VPS plans are hosted per server, but each of them is in a completely separate server environment with guaranteed resource allocation exceeding that of most shared hosting plans. Virtual private servers cost more than shared hosting, but they provide considerably more flexibility and better performance. And, because of excellent server control panels like Plesk and InterWorx, while virtual private servers are more complex to manage than shared hosting, they do not require users to be command line gurus.
Users have complete control over their own VPS and can install and configure its software as they require. They are the best choice for businesses that need more control over their hosting environment than shared hosting can offer and expect to have a significant number of daily visitors.
Virtual private servers are also more easily scalable than shared hosting accounts. As a business grows, the resources available to a VPS can be increased to accommodate growing loads. One of the major growing pains faced by rapidly expanding businesses is caused by not being able to smoothly scale their online infrastructure. Choosing a virtual private server from the start makes it much easier for the infrastructure to be scaled in line with business growth.
Shared hosting and virtual private servers are both excellent hosting solutions in the right circumstances, but, before you make a choice, be aware of the pros and cons of each.
