Shared web hosting is an excellent choice if you only get a few hundred visitors a week. However, if you are serious about having an online business or building a wider audience for your blog, you will need to up your web hosting game. Once you grow past that limit, your web hosting provider will not only slow down your site, they might suspend your site and ask you to upgrade to a premium plan. Whether you are looking to switch to a VPS or just weighing your options, this article will guide you through everything you need to know about Virtual Private Servers and VPS hosting.
VPS Hosting Explained
A single server costs money to build, maintain, and run. Fortunately, using a process called virtualization, hosting providers are able to create multiple virtual or pseudo instances of a server. These virtual instances are known as Virtual Private Servers, or VPS for short. VPS offers full control over how your website runs and what software it operates on.
However, although it gives you more control than shared hosting, it is also more difficult to manage. If you have little server management experience or can’t hire a web developer who can handle the server for you, you will have a hard time setting it up and maintaining your website on a VPS.
You can still enjoy the benefits of running your website on a virtual private server by hosting it alongside a managed VPS hosting provider. You can focus more on your business rather than on server management.
Managed VPS costs a little more, however, it offers support from an experienced team that can help you solve any website-related problem.
VPS Hosting Pros
Here’s why you should consider picking VPS hosting.
Better Performance
You will see a huge boost in performance if you move your website from a shared web hosting to a VPS. When using shared hosting, your website has to share server resources with potentially hundreds of other sites. Whereas on a VPS, your website gets to use all the available resources dedicated to it.
Better Reliability
If you ever hosted a blog on a shared web hosting account, then you’ve probably faced outage once or twice on your website’s availability whenever there is a surge in traffic.
On a VPS, however, your website is allowed to use all the dedicated sources. So, the chances of your website going down are rather low.
More Control
A Virtual Private Server gives you full control over how your website works. You can set up everything however you like, from the server operating system to the software bundle you want to work with. VPS offers you the control you need to make your websites as intricate as you like.
Easily Scalable
Scaling a VPS server is only a few clicks away. Whether you’re getting a thousand visitors per month or every hour, you can easily scale your VPS to handle the load. Most VPS hosting providers grant you the freedom to upgrade your VPS based on your requirements.
Suitable for Online Businesses
If you own an online business or are responsible for one, you know the importance of being able to scale operations. Whether you are running a Software as a Service business model or selling online courses, you can rely on VPS to handle all of that traffic.
Using VPS you can create complicated architectures that take failure prevention into account. You can create multiple instances of a VPS and serve data from the ones that are available. This can help prevent your website from going down but requires some web development experience to set up.
VPS Hosting Cons
While VPS is a wonderful web hosting solution, there are some drawbacks.
Not Suitable for a Beginner
Unless you can afford to hire a web developer to maintain and manage your website regularly, VPS might not be the best solution for you.
Although VPS servers are difficult to maintain on your own, there are web hosting providers that offer managed VPS hosting. They take care of your server’s maintenance, security, and performance issues. Furthermore, it does make running your website on a VPS a lot easier as it comes with a cPanel dashboard.
On a side note, if you just want to run a WordPress blog, then a managed WordPress hosting is a much better alternative. However, you will have to give up the freedom of control, you’ll get more reliability and easier management options.
Costs More Than Shared Hosting
If you are on a shoe-string budget, then going with a VPS may not be the best choice. It costs more than shared hosting and this price can add up if you can’t operate your VPS on your own.
VPS Hosting vs Shared Hosting
There are a few major differences between VPS hosting and shared hosting. One is that on a shared hosting plan, you get a limited piece of a server and you have to share it with hundreds of other sites.
While VPS offers more freedom than shared hosting, it is also a lot more difficult to manage. Managing your website using shared hosting is a lot simpler and easier as everything is designed for simplicity. If you are just starting, I recommend that you go with a shared hosting plan, such as Hostinger.
If you are thinking about going for a VPS for your website, I recommend at least a managed VPS as it will come with its own cPanel, which makes it a whole lot easier to oversee your website without writing any code.
VPS Hosting vs Dedicated Servers
Dedicated servers are what VPS servers are made of. It comes with a lot more RAM and CPU power. With a dedicated server, you can create your own instances of VPS servers on top of your server if you want.
If you are just starting out, just like with VPS, I highly recommend that you don’t host your website on a dedicated server. While a dedicated server comes with a lot more resources than a VPS or a shared hosting plan, it also needs a lot more maintenance.
If you move your website from a shared hosting account to a VPS, you will see a huge boost in speed. However, if you move your website from a VPS to a dedicated server, the difference will be almost negligible. I only recommend going with a dedicated server if you know what you are doing and your website is getting a lot of traffic.
To Sum Things Up
Getting a VPS hosting plan can give your website a huge boost in speed, but it comes at the cost. Managing a VPS is much more difficult, but it does provide you with more freedom.
If you are thinking about hosting your website on a VPS, try managed VPS hosting. You don’t have to worry about keeping your server secure as it overseers your overall website’s performance.
If you have any more questions, feel free to leave a comment down below.
Leave a Reply