Whether you’re a blogger, a small business owner, or a CEO in need of web hosting, you might be wondering what web hosting is and what kind best suits you. For instance, a common question is, “Should I choose VPS hosting or shared hosting?” Well, there are several advantages to each that we will walk you through below.
What Is Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting is a lot like living in an apartment building with a courtyard, garden, or pool that is also used by your “neighbours.”
With this type of affordable web hosting, you share the same server hardware such as CPU and RAM alongside other websites. Permissions restrict access or “cage” individual user accounts with CloudLinux to prevent security issues. So, there is no real reason for concern. Although, shared hosting does have both its advantages and disadvantages.
Shared hosting is a good choice for:
- -People planning start-ups
- -Blogs and personal websites
- -Small to medium-sized businesses
Shared hosting is a terrific entry point into the hosting market, allowing you to maximize hosting costs as your business expands.
Advantages
Regularly scheduled server upgrades and maintenance are run in the background during off-peak hours. You don’t have to hire a whole IT team or outsource administration because shared hosting providers maintain their own server environments. So, no additional training or technical expertise is required on your part and you can focus on your website.
What is VPS Hosting
Virtual private server hosting is more like owning a single-family home compared to the shared hosting example above. The difference is VPS hosting means maintaining your own operating system. The responsibility is entirely yours, but so is the freedom! You have complete “root” access to the server, everything, any configuration or customisation is possible. VPS hosting may be the way to go for websites dealing with secure data or resource-heavy applications.
VPS hosting is an ideal choice for:
- -Resellers hosting multiple websites
- –Businesses that are rapidly growing
- -Companies expecting substantial sales
- -Entrepreneurs with e-commerce needs
In short, VPS hosting is a match when your company is having growing pains and expansion is inevitable.
Advantages
Success has a price, but the scalability of VPS servers keeps costs reasonable. Plus, you save yourself the headache of a migration based on changing hardware needs. Instead, you can increase and decrease server resources such as RAM, CPU, and disk space as needed, with the click of a few buttons in most cases. The same goes for data backup and restoration.
Like shared hosting, VPS hosting offers a number of its own advantages. The basic benefits of VPS hosting are root access, scalability, and backup and restoration.
When to Move from Shared Hosting to VPS Hosting
A slow site is not always the result of a bad shared host. Loading too many WordPress plugins, uncompressed images, and HTTP requests on a page will undoubtedly diminish connection speed at some point. For instance, consider the visitors using mobile devices.
You can check your website’s speed at GTMetrix. Scoring is based on numerous analyzations. However, unless you score remarkably high, you probably have some work to do. The good news is there is room for improvement. Even if your site already looks perfect, this is worth paying attention to because Google uses speed as a ranking factor.
However, if your site is hogging more than its fair share of shared server resources it may be throttled intentionally (or caged as mentioned above). So, if you are wondering if it’s time to move from shared hosting to VPS hosting, then yes, it probably is. It is time to move from shared to VPS. Specifically, when your:
- -Start-up is expanding exponentially
- -Sales see a substantial jump in revenue
- -Marketing campaign outperforms expectations
Gecko is a provider of both shared and VPS hosting, take a look at our plans today!