Shared Hosting Vs Virtual Private Server

Web hosting comes in several different forms and packages like Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, VPS Hosting and finally the Shared Hosting. Some of them even prefer hosting websites on their home computer with a broadband connection.

The two most popular options for the consumer are Shared hosting – where one server is used to host hundreds of sites by dividing the server resources equally among them – and VPS hosting. VPS stands for “Virtual Private Server”, which has various advantages like privacy and security over Shared Hosting.

In shared hosting since all the websites are hosted on the same server, all the resources like RAM, Processor and Hard Disks gets equally divided across all websites. The problem comes when one of the hundred website starts getting affected by malicious entities like viruses. It affects all the websites on the server.

On the other hand VPS offers more privacy, slightly higher cost, but more control or more responsibility – for example, over operating systems and installed programs. VPS hosting allows you control over configuration and firewalls, but within strict limits set by the owner of the server you are on. This means that the others sharing a server with you cannot harm you too easily.

Though VPS Hosting is better than Shared Hosting I don’t mean to say that Shared Hosting is a complete disaster. It really depends on the host, for example Hostgator and Blue Host handle their servers really well, while others do better with people to take over the headache for them. For beginners who require only basic levels of bandwidth and disk space, shared hosting from a reliable service is a much more preferred option than a VPS.

There is one more risk factor involved with Shared Hosting, since one IP is shared across hundreds of sites there is a possibility that one of those hundred users is a spammer. The problem arises when search engines blacklists the IP. This can severely affect your website traffic and degrade it. Getting a dedicated IP address for your website is the only solution for this. Your host will charge you approximately $5 per month, a small price to pay. Also please consider that not even a dedicated IP will give you the security you get with a VPS system.

Finally, the conclusion I have arrived at is that shared hosting – with a well-known, reliable host – is definitely the best option for personal or small-scale users. But for people with big plans for their web presence, VPS is a long-term investment that will last for a lifetime. The additional privacy, control and scalability it offers is worth ten times its cost.

Choosing between Shared Hosting or VPS hosting is tough. Select web hosting that allows you to switch from one to another easily.

How To Choose A Web Hosting Service

Choosing a Web Hosting Service plays a vital part in a website’s success. With different providers having different plans and packages it can get really difficult for you to choose one. Let me help you with it.
There are different types of hosting – Dedicated Hosting, VPS Hosting, Shared Hosting and the most recent and popular one is the elastic Cloud Hosting.

Requirement Analysis
First step is to analyze your requirement, for eg., You want to host a blog or a single static website for promoting your business, a shared hosting with a dedicated IP would be an appropriate choice. But again if your business is a big corporation, I suggest you use a higher hosting standard like a Dedicated Server which will come with more flexible control over your server and will have higher resources compared to Shared Hosting or VPS Hosting.
If you are planning to start an e-commerce portal and have a limited budget, you can use shared hosting with a dedicated IP address and a Private SSL Certificate for more security. Shared hosting is not ideal for e-commerce since the application needs a lot of resources for functioning fast and reliably which is not offered by Shared Hosting. So I would recommend using this only if you are expecting small number of visitors per day say 150. If your number of visitors increase to a great extent, the account starts consuming more resources and once it reaches the maximum limit the hosting account gets temporarily suspended(Site is offline). Once you reach this mark(around 15 visitors/day), please upgrade to a VPS since an Offline website is not an option for an e-commerce portal.
Shared Hosting with Unlimited Bandwidth and Disk Space can also be used as an Update server for an application with small user-base.

Beware of Unlimited Hosting Plans
Now-a-days every hosting company has an Unlimited Hosting plan, but is it really Unlimited?
No! It isn’t except for bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, parked domains, addon domains and sub domains maybe even MySQL databases. Sure its an important factor but for handling all these in a truly unlimited manner requires unlimited CPU resource. The companies limit each account to only 25-30% of total resource usage. As soon as your account exceeds the number your account is suspended which makes your website unavailable to users.

Scalability
Some web applications have situation where sometimes the resources required by the application may exceed for small period of time. Now if that application is hosted on a VPS or a Dedicated Server, it is not possible to scale the server automatically at run-time i.e., without taking it offline. This is where Elastic Cloud Hosting comes to rescue. In this type of hosting, the server automatically scales as the requirement is increased or decreased and the user ends up paying only for the “actual” resource usage without any extra charge. That means if the website uses less HDD Space, Bandwidth, Memory and CPU you need to pay less and if the usage increases you need to pay a bit more than average.
Because of the flexibility that Cloud Hosting provides, its my personal favorite. It is suitable for all kinds of application from small to large.

Operating System
Operating System is the most critical part when it comes to choosing a hosting service. If you are running an ASP application I suggest you go with Windows Hosting since Linux won’t support ASP. If you are planning on hosting a static website in HTML or a dynamic PHP website, you should go with Linux as PHP/MySQL are open source technologies that run without any issues on Linux. Since you don’t need to purchase any license for the OS, its is cost effective too.
If you are buying a VPS or Dedicated Hosting and you are not familiar with Linux environment, please go with Windows since I find it very much user friendly for remote access.

Uptime
Look for an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, any downtime is bad as your site will simply not be available and you will lose visitors – maybe permanently.

Technical Support
If you experience urgent problems you want help immediately. You should therefore expect support to be available 24/7 by telephone, not just by email.

30 Days Money Back Guarantee
Not a “must have” feature to look for but if you are choosing a newly formed web hosting company look for this guarantee.

Other general features
Other general features you should look for are:
Control Panel(Cpanel/Plesk)
FTP Accounts
Shell Access
phpMyAdmin
Web Mail
SMTP/POP 3 Support
Domain Name Control Panel
File Manager

Also don’t forget to check reviews of various Web Hosting providers if you are still confused a lot.
Reviews will help you a lot in deciding which one to choose.