Differences Between Shared and VPS Hosting: Which One is For You?

Even the best intentions can result in less-than-ideal outcomes. When you don’t have the full picture, the unexpected can happen — and it’s usually not good. Baking a cake, for example, requires a certain attention to detail.

Knowing your options for web hosting will help avoid half-baked results when it comes to setting up your website. Whether you are redesigning your site or putting it together for the first time, you’ll want to find the hosting plan with the greatest potential to make your site taste the best — erm, be successful.

One of the decisions you’ll have to make is choosing between shared hosting and virtual private server (VPS) hosting.

Neither one is inherently better than the other — it all depends on your website’s unique requirements. You may need super-tight security, lightning-fast speed, a low price point, or scalable resources, among other considerations.

By carefully considering the pros and cons of each option, however, you can have your cake and eat it too.

While both shared and VPS hosting can make your website a success, the differences between the two are significant enough to require some explanation.

With one option, you get an entire cake to yourself; with the other, you just get a slice. Before we go into what gives these two approaches their distinct flavor, let’s clarify what goes into each one.

Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting Basics

With shared hosting, your site shares one server with many other sites. It’s kind of like an apartment building: you get one unit in a larger structure. This option tends to be the cheapest because providers can serve many customers from one machine. Shared servers offer customers less bandwidth, management flexibility, and performance, but the hosts take care of all technical configurations, maintenance, and security.

A step up from shared servers is VPS hosting, which offers more room to grow and fewer restrictions. This version of online real estate is more like a digital condo — more space to call home where you can host your website or application on a virtual server allocated solely to you.

You’ll still share the physical server with a few others, but resources are partitioned off and dedicated to each user. Since you don’t have to compete for computing power, there is less worry about other websites using up too much bandwidth or storage and slowing down your site. These plans are typically more costly than shared hosting but still quite reasonable.

Potential customers should check out reviews to learn more about the shared and VPS hosting services we offer. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages. Let’s take a closer look at exactly what that entails.