Have you been told in the past that you need VPS or dedicated hosting? Have you ever wondered why? We’ve posted this article because of one reason – a lot of customers come to us complaining about their website being slow despite paying a lot for VPS. Surprise surprise, good hosting is not only about money. It is also all about software and configuration.
Talking about hardware without using difficult technical terms is not an easy task, but “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Let’s start then!
What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting is the most affordable, and the easiest to use type of hosting but also it has limited capabilities. Let me explain it that way: your website will be placed on one powerful machine along with many other websites. All of them will be using server resources as they need them. What does it mean? It means that if, at some point in time, your website becomes very popular, or some other website on the same server becomes very popular, then everyone’s websites might get slower. So is it really bad? Not at all. Servers designed for shared hosting are usually powerful enough to host 200 websites without a negative impact on the performance.
On top of that, some shared hostings like ours will have “Lite Speed Cache” available, which not only can greatly speed up your website but also reduces stress on the server so all of the websites on it can perform very well. For the majority of websites, shared hosting usually comes with a software called cPanel. What are the benefits of cPanel? You can manage your own emails (edit, add, delete), install different software with few clicks, have Free SSL certificate (with our hosting) and do many other cool things without asking a development company for help like using the visual website builder to build your own website. This means that shared hosting can also help you to save money.
Managing VPS from the terminal
Managing server using cPanel
At the same time, shared hosting is not a good option for big, complex applications having a lot of traffic as they usually require a lot of processing power, server memory or complex caching systems that may not be available on shared hosting.
What is VPS hosting?
VPS hosting is still shared hosting, with the difference that server resources are not shared between websites. In fact, they are reserved for each account separately. Technically your website will be limited by server resources, and if you have too much traffic, you will notice that performance drops. At the same time, if some other website has high traffic – yours will not be affected.
Which hosting is best for me, shared hosting or VPS hosting?
How do we decide which one will be best for you? It is simple. We don’t want you to overpay so if the website performance on shared hosting is good, then just keep it. The price is only about 300 AED per year while VPS will cost you at least 800 AED per year. Is there any difference between those servers for you as a customer? Technically speaking – no, as you are not developing the website, but in practice shared hosting doesn’t require that much technical knowledge because it has a “cPanel” preinstalled. At the same time, VPS in many cases needs to be managed from the terminal.
Why is choosing good hosting so important?
We can tell you for sure, think twice before getting your hosting. Hosting companies have much higher profits on VPS and dedicated servers than they have on shared hosting, but in reality, for a normal private or company website – Shared Hosting is all you need. On our shared hosting, we have tested different websites, from the custom build, through WordPress, and we even tried running Magento 2 platform on it! Results? Normal websites, different administration systems, CRM systems, WordPress websites (don’t worry if you don’t know what WordPress is, we will cover it in the next chapter) are running perfectly fine. By the way, natwebsolutions.com is on our shared hosting and combined with LiteSpeed Cache, which is also available on our platform, and we get pretty good results.
So what is the cost? 299 AED per year. How much would you have to pay for VPS for a year? On Digital Ocean you can get a VPS from 10 USD per month, but we tried WordPress on it, no luck, 20 USD per month allowed us to have a stable website but that is already 220 USD per year, almost 270% more expensive than shared hosting for very similar results.
What are the other differences between Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting?
We would put it like this:
| Shared Hosting | VPS Hosting | |
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As you can see, there is no reason for you not to try shared hosting before you go for a more expensive option. Transferring the website is usually a fast process. It doesn’t require putting your website offline, so if you realize that you need more than shared hosting, you can always transfer your website. Usually, a company who will be providing the VPS hosting will usually do it for you free of charge. Shared Hosting is affordable and often is the cheapest way of getting your first website and reaching more customers!
And what is your experience with hosting?