Dedicated Vs VPS Vs Shared Hosting
How to choose the best hosting for you
When moving your business online one of the important questions that you need to consider is about hosting. Hosting will provide your website with a digital “home” where its files are stored and from where it will be accessible on the World Wide Web for your clients. The quality of your hosting will directly affect the speed and downtime of your website and as a result its search engine ranking and your clients’ experience as a whole.
Thus, in a way, fast and reliable hosting is crucial for your digital success. Yet, how to choose the best hosting option for your business? In this article, we will talk about and compare the three most popular hosting options: Dedicated Vs VPS Vs Shared Hosting. We will briefly explain each of them and compare them in several categories so that you can understand what they are and what strengths and limitations they have.
Hosting types explained:
Dedicated Vs VPS Vs Shared Hosting: Comparison Table
Dedicated Hosting
Customization
Full: With Dedicated Hosting, you have direct control over the server’s hardware and you could customize it to your needs. Also, you will be free to install, update and remove any software and systems.
Control
Highest: You can either control your hosting environment fully or use professionally managed hosting services, if you prefer to rely on experts, your provider will offer you technical support and help you make the most of your dedicated server.
Scalability
Mid-level: The scalability is limited to the options provided by your dedicated server. However, if possible you can upgrade the server to meet your current needs. Keep in mind though, that during the upgrade your website would be most probably down.
Security
Highest: As you have the whole server for yourself, there are minimum risks of someone messing up with its hardware. Moreover, your connection is completely private. You can also install your own protection software to comply with your business regulations. Besides, unlike VPS hosting, with dedicated you can take advantage of a traditional hardware firewall.
Performance
Highest: In general, your hosting performance correlates with the server’s hardware specifications. The higher they are, the better the performance will be. In general, with Dedicated hosting, as you do not share any of the server’s resources with anyone else, you will enjoy the highest performance out of the 3 hosting types.
Price
Most Expensive Option: In comparison to the other two hosting types, Dedicated hosting will come at a higher price. Yet, for the higher price, you will get the highest performance, security, etc.
VPS Hosting
Customization
High-level: The biggest restriction with this type of hosting is that you will have no direct access to the server’s hardware. Apart from that, you will be able to install, update, and remove software to customize your hosting to your needs.
Control
High-level: You will have no control over the hardware environment. Like dedicated hosting, here you also can either manage your hosting environment yourself or use professionally managed hosting services.
Scalability
Highest: In terms of scalability, VPS hosting is the most flexible option. It can be tailored to your website growth, as it allows you to add or remove resources (e.g. CPU cores, system memory, SSD storage, etc.) to accommodate for website traffic changes.
Security
High: VPS hosting has a very high level of security as your website has no real contact with the other websites on the virtual server. Furthermore, you will have your own IP address. Similarly, to dedicated hosting you are free to choose and install your own additional protection software, but you cannot do anything about adding extra protection to the hardware.
Performance
Mid-level: VPS vs shared hosting has a much higher performance. Its high performance will meet many growing businesses’ needs. However, keep in mind that Dedicated hosting will always have the advantage (especially with similar server specifications) of using all of the resources of the server for one website only.
Price
In the Middle: VPS hosting takes the middle place in terms of costs, as it is more expensive than Shared Hosting but still in most cases more affordable than Dedicated. But keep in mind that the more resources and services you need, the higher the price will be.
Shared Hosting
Customization
Low to none: With Shared Hosting in most cases you have no access to any service-level or server-level configuration. Therefore, customization options, if there are any, are limited to surface-level changes.
Control
Restricted: Same as configuration, your control over any features and functions is very restricted at best to no control at all.
Scalability
Limited: Users are often limited to their starting hosting package options. As they share the server’s resources with many other websites, often it is the case that, there are no more resources left to scale up, without moving to another server or a hosting type.
Security
Lowest: There are various security risks with shared hosting. For instance, a security breach or infection on any of the websites on the same server can lead to all the other sites being infected as well. Furthermore, in practice it is often observed that the more domains pointed to the same shared server’s IP address, the more often such server is targeted for an intrusion.
Performance
Lowest: Shared hosting provides you with the lowest performance compared to the other two types, as you will share one server’s resources with all of the websites hosted on it. There can even be instances where several sites take up almost all the resources due to their high traffic, resulting in bad performance and low speed for your website.
Price
Cheapest Option: Shared Hosting is cheaper than the other options due to its shared nature. However, to keep the costs low often more websites reside on one server than it can handle, resulting in websites being down if there are higher levels of traffic.
Conclusion:
Now that you understand some of the main differences between Dedicated Vs VPS Vs Shared Hosting, you can make an informed decision, which one is the best for you and your business. Each of them has its own set of advantages and disadvantages to weigh against each other, balancing between factors, such as customization, performance, and price.
Even armed with all this knowledge, it could still be tricky to decide on what type of hosting fits your needs. But don’t worry, we have your back. Share your hosting requirements with us, and our experts will guide you on what option can meet them.
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