To establish a successful presence on the web, a suitable hosting solution is vital. You might already have an idea of different hosting options that you can find on the market. But if you are still looking for your option and want to clarify all these concepts a bit more.
Dedicated hosting, dedicated server, and virtual server price may vary noticeably, but so do the features included. The best approach is to choose one according to the website needs of your business, the type of website you want to create, its requirements both in terms of resources and security, etc. Without further ado, let’s dive deeper into analyzing the three fundamental types of web hosting.
Shared Hosting
The essential unit of hosting is a server – a specialized computing unit that is placed in professional network infrastructure and is running continuously to make a website accessible 24/7.
The point is that a server is in fact a rather potent computing machine, having a great deal of resources at its disposal. It can indeed provide the operation of pretty large-scale projects, like big e-commerce websites and similar. However, when it comes to something much smaller, the dedicated server resource turns out to be a bit too much, while requiring a considerable capital investment. For this reason, some other hosting solutions have been presented, among which shared hosting.
As you can suggest from the name, shared hosting relies on sharing the resources of a single server among several users. As a result, they get a functional hosting solution for a fairly cheap price. Nevertheless, shared hosting is not free from drawbacks.
On shared hosting, there is no regulated allocation of resources. All users use the resources from the identical pool, so it may be the sometimes the case that the general number of resources becomes insufficient and the overall performance of the server with every user account will slow down or experience downtimes.
Another problem with shared hosting is its limited security. Its principle of operation limits possible ways to implement proper security measures. Besides that, all accounts share the same environment, and the security of one is compromised, the rest are under serious risk.
Furthermore, shared hosting has limited customization options in general. All user accounts must share the same operation system. Additionally, the provider may impose a number of restrictions to regulate the server resource use with fines for going against them.
All in all, shared hosting is an OK hosting solution, but for projects of the smallest scale, where there is no need for high-quality hosting.
Virtual Private Server
If you don’t have very high technical requirements and don’t have an unlimited budget, but still want a stable solution with rich functionality, VPS hosting is likely to be your option.
VPS hosting can be seen as a different way of partitioning the parental server, however, more technologically advanced and giving a wider range of benefits.
Virtual Private Servers are created through virtualization technology. Virtualization refers to a number of approaches to creating separate virtual environments that have dedicated resources and function independently from each other. This is a perfect approach, in particular, when we want to share a whole server for projects of smaller scale, but still want to preserve its functionality.
Eventually, a VPS has most of the advantages associated with dedicated hosting – dedicated resources, a separate operating system, root access, full customization in all terms, stable performance, uptime, and reliable security.
Besides that, a VPS is noticeably lower in price and is highly flexible because of its scalability – as your projects grow, you can easily switch to a more robust VPS configuration to face new challenges with an updated pool of resources.
Dedicated server
A dedicated server is the ultimate hosting solution presented by an entire physical server rented by a single customer. There isn’t much to tell about this solution, since it offers maximum resources, maximum reliability, and security for big projects. In addition to that, dedicated hosting providers often allow their clients to customize the dedicated server hardware configuration which allows them to fine-tune the server for some very particular projects.
The main drawback of this option has been already mentioned above and is its price, making a dedicated server a kind of luxury and a waste of financial resources in case this number of capacities is not really required.
What server to choose?
As we mentioned not once, your final choice shall depend on your eventual requirements. A small website that is not intended for commercial use, at least for a broad and regular audience, will work just fine on shared hosting.
If your project isn’t huge, but still needs stable performance, and customization, and is likely to grow later on, then a VPS will be a suitable option.
A dedicated server is in turn a good option whenever you need to satisfy the need of large-scale projects with dozens of pages, rich functionality, and hundreds of daily visitors – a high-quality e-commerce website is a typical example.
We hope that this article has made everything clear for you and now you have an exact idea of what type of hosting you want to choose for your project. Good luck!