Shared web hosting has enabled the ordinary Joe to launch a website with minimal investment of effort and money.
There are various advantages of shared web hosting, and there are a few disadvantages as well. The low cost of shared hosting comes at some cost to performance, which may make it an unreliable option once a website starts receiving more traffic and requests than the shared resources can handle.
A more powerful alternative to shared hosting is a virtual private server (VPS). This gives you more resources that are (fully or partially) dedicated to your website, in addition to a few other perks.
But will your website actually benefit from moving from shared hosting to VPS hosting? Let’s analyze some of the main arguments that VPS proponents often make.
Argument #1: VPS hosting is faster than shared hosting, or is it?
It is true that with a VPS you generally get higher performance as a result of the increased server resources (CPU, RAM, I/O, etc.) which are available for your website to utilize. But there are a couple of important things to keep in mind here.
Not all VPS providers offer guaranteed or dedicated resources. Yep, you may not actually get 100% capacity of the resources allocated to your VPS account – particularly CPU – because many providers oversell their servers.
Ever wondered why one provider charges $20 a month for 1 CPU core while another charges $10 a month for 2 CPU cores?! VPS with shared resources sounds counterproductive, but that’s exactly what many (cheap) VPS services in fact are.
The other thing that can affect performance and speed is the software stack on the server and how it’s configured. This typically comes fully tested and optimized with shared hosting, but with VPS hosting, it’s all your responsibility to figure out the right software and the right configurations to implement in order to achieve optimal performance.
Argument #2: VPS hosting is more secure, or is it?
It is true that because of the completely isolated software environment, your website should be exposed to fewer security threats as opposed to a shared hosting environment.
But security doesn’t come by default with a VPS server, so you will have to take some measures to secure your server.
You’ll need to keep all your server’s systems up-to-date and apply any security patches as soon as they’re released. You’ll need to tweak certain software settings in order to prevent possible security exploits. You’ll need to install and monitor security systems that deal with various types of threats (malware, spam bots, DDoS, etc.)
That’s a lot of manual work that falls on your shoulders if you choose to manage your own VPS server.
Argument #3: VPS hosting is more scalable, or is it?
One of the key advantages of VPS hosting over shared hosting is its better flexibility and scalability. But that really varies from one VPS service to another.
Traditional VPS hosting usually has limited ability to scale, and this is often done by upgrading or downgrading to a different plan. It’s very similar to scaling a shared hosting plan.
On the other hand, could-based VPS services can offer much more flexibility when scaling up or down.
Some cloud VPS providers allow you to scale certain resources automatically and as needed without having to upgrade or downgrade your plan each time, which can be very cost effective for highly dynamic websites.
The bottom line is that VPS hosting does have certain advantages over shared hosting, but those vary from one use case to another and from one VPS service to another.
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