Website Hosting

Shared vs VPS vs Dedicated Servers

The following explains the differences between the various types of hosting available for your website and email.

  1. Shared Hosting

    The most basic and cheapest of the hosting tiers. These plans allow you to rent space on a shared hosting server, which also hosts many other websites on the same server alongside your website. These plans are the cheapest solutions as they provide the least performance, security, and flexibility.

  2. VPS Hosting

    Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting is a cross between Shared & Dedicated. A physical server, called the parent, runs several VPS instances, which are granted a strict portion of the parent server’s hardware resources. These instances are rented out and operate as independent servers from one another. So it’s essentially renting part of a dedicated server. These plans range in prices and offer easy affordable scaling and better performance or security than a shared hosting website.

  3. Dedicated Hosting

    The top tier of web hosting, Dedicated Servers are just what the name implies, a server dedicated to you. All the hardware that makes up the server is under your control. Dedicated servers often share network access with neighbouring dedicated servers in a data center, but they share no hardware and each one is dedicated to its own customer. These plans tend to be the most expensive but give you the best performance, security, and flexibility.

Performance

Performance matters. If you want to keep your clients happy, you need to provide them with top-notch performance. A survey conducted by Kissmetrics discovered that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.

Furthermore, 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online. The bottom line here?

It takes only a literal second of difference from slow page loads to lose out many potential or even perpetual sales.

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Security

While Risky Business was big in the ‘80’s, business today is all about minimizing threats. When comparing shared hosting vs VPS vs dedicated servers, the differences become clear very quickly.
Can you afford the risk of a client’s site being hacked? As a business owner, in addition to the costs of downtime and repairs for a client’s site going down, your reputation is also impacted, which is a much more serious and permanent problem.

Consider the following security summary for each type before you decide what is right for your website.

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