Shared Hosting vs VPS: Which One Should You Use in ?

Shared Hosting vs VPS: Which One Should You Use in 2021?

? Shared hosting vs VPS definitions

Before we can talk about the pros and cons of each approach, we first need to define both types of hosting.

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting is the cheapest form of website hosting. It’s cheap because your hosting account “shares” resources with other accounts/customers on the server.

By sharing resources in this way, the hosting provider is able to keep its costs down and pass those savings on to you.

Of course, the downside of this sharing approach is that your site doesn’t have its own dedicated resources. If another account on the server is using too many resources, that can have a negative effect on your sites.

To prevent this situation from happening, shared hosts usually apply some type of usage limit and will cut off sites that abuse resources too much (or ask you to upgrade to a more expensive plan). This is true even if your shared host advertises “unlimited” everything.

? Let’s look at a housing analogy to drive home this point…

Shared hosting is like living with roommates…except you have no idea who the roommates are. Maybe you’re lucky and get the quiet roommate who just hangs out in their room (an account with low-traffic sites). Or, maybe you’re unlucky and get the disrespectful person who likes to throw house parties during the workweek (someone whose sites are resource hogs).

If you get stuck in the second situation, your quality of life is going to drop a lot.

What’s more, you have no control over not only who the roommates are but even how many roommates you have. In order to save money, some hosts do the equivalent of putting eight roommates in a four-bedroom house (not fun!), while some higher-quality shared hosts might just keep things at four roommates, which means there are still plenty of resources to go around.

Ok, that’s a long analogy, but you probably get the idea…

With shared hosting, your sites are affected by your neighbors’ sites and you have no control over those neighbors. Additionally, your sites can also affect your neighbors, which is why shared hosts might ask you to upgrade if you’re consuming more than your fair share of resources.

This setup keeps things cheap, but at the expense of some performance and reliability. Some hosts are better/worse than others when it comes to how many accounts share the resources, which is why you can have big differences in quality between different shared hosts.

What is VPS hosting?

In the hierarchy of website hosting, VPS hosting is the next “step up” above shared hosting. With a VPS, you still share a server with other accounts. But instead of needing to share server resources as well, your site gets its own dedicated resources with a VPS.

For example, let’s say there are eight accounts on the server. Well, each account might get 1/8th of the server’s resources. Unlike shared hosting, individual accounts cannot affect other accounts because each hosting account is virtually isolated in its own container.

The upshot of this approach is that hosts are still able to keep the costs fairly low because they’re dividing the server’s resources. But unlike shared hosting, your site still gets its own dedicated resources and you don’t have to worry about other accounts having a negative effect on your sites.

? Let’s go back to our housing analogy to illustrate this point:

A VPS is like owning your own condo inside a condo building and not having any roommates.

With a VPS, you still don’t own the entire building, but at least you don’t have to worry about losing access to your living room because your roommate decided they want to throw a party.

Want to own the entire building? Well, you need dedicated hosting for that.

Inside the bubble of VPS hosting, there’s another distinction – cloud VPS hosting. Cloud VPS hosting follows all the same principles as “regular” VPS hosting, but the difference is in the underlying physical hardware:

  • “Regular” VPS hosting – you get your virtual share of resources from a single physical machine.
  • Cloud VPS hosting – you get your virtual share of resources from a network of machines (the cloud).

In 2021 and beyond, most people/businesses are shifting towards the cloud VPS approach, which is why platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. are growing so quickly.

Beyond that, there’s one other important distinction – managed VPS hosting vs unmanaged VPS hosting:

  • Managed VPS hosting – your hosting provider takes care of installing the needed software and maintaining the server itself.
  • Unmanaged VPS hosting – you’re responsible for everything about your VPS, including installing basic software and maintaining the hosting.

If you’re a casual user, you’ll definitely want to stick to managed VPS hosting providers.

?? What are the pros and cons of shared hosting vs VPS?

Keep reading the article at CodeinWP. The article was originally written by CodeinWP Editorial on 2021-01-26 05:32:35.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.

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