Any modern business will benefit from having a professional website. A website provides a gateway to a larger market, and most businesses recognize that a website is essential for growth. For small and medium-sized businesses, making the online transition can sometimes be intimidating, especially when it comes to the different hosting solutions that are available.
One area that often leads to confusion; is the difference between shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting. The three options have some similarities but can provide different benefits at an additional cost. Choosing the right hosting solution for your website is your responsibility, however, our engineers are assisting our customers to choose the right hosting plan and provide the advice for the best results and peace of mind.
The following is a breakdown of each solution, with simple explanations aimed towards online business owners.
Shared Webhosting for Online Business
Hosting is essentially the parking garage for a business website. A hosting solution combines storage, bandwidth, and the hardware and software that is needed to start and maintain an online presence.
Entry level packages are predominantly shared solutions, which offers a good compromise between performance and affordability.
Hosting providers use servers to store website data and service their customers. With a shared solution, an online business website will be stored on a server that is also used by other websites. This makes hosting more affordable and accessible.
The server needs to share all resources between websites (including storage, RAM, network connectivity, and processing power), which in old days can mean degraded performance when compared to VPS or dedicated hosting. While technology is developing very fast, we’ve now CloudLinux OS that creates a virtual and separated environment for each website to avoid one big website eating up the resources of other smaller websites on the same server, it’s like a fair usage policy and this technology allow hosting providers to allocate dedicated resources for each website which significantly increased website performance and speed on shared hosting servers. For smaller lightweight websites, a shared hosting package can be more than adequate. For larger websites, this type of service will quickly reveal limitations as shared hosting is designed primarily for small websites (Personal websites, blogs, small forums, etc..)
Virtual Private Servers for Increased Customization
The next on the tier is a Virtual Private Server or VPS. This technology can host more than one VPS on the same dedicated server with the same hardware and resources, with the advantage that all VPS servers are hosted within a virtualized environment. There are a number of advantages to doing this. The most important is that resources are allocated to each VPS individually and each VPS has full root access and you’ve full control over your hosting environment like a dedicated server but with fewer resources and an affordable price. While VPS is a virtual server, this gives the possibility of upgrading your resources at any time with less downtime possible as there is no hardware needs to be replaced, it’s just a click of a mouse and your server is more powerful.
On VPS hosting, each virtual server will still share the same physical hardware, but they will each have individual access to a certain percentage of those resources. This means that performance is stable and sites won’t become bogged down as each waits for its turn to access the processor, storage, or memory.
VPS can allow for better configuration freedom to install any required software and you can install your desired operating system (OS) and there is theoretically more stability (most modern hosting solutions, even shared, are inherently stable with +90% yearly up-time while HostRound uptime is 99.999%.)
The key advantages here are faster load times for websites and more customization of what can be run on the web server.
The disadvantages are higher cost and increased technical setup. Some hosting providers may offer hosting assistance and one-click setup for popular platforms (such as WordPress), at HostRound we provide fully managed VPS, so you don’t have to be an expert to run your websites on our VPS, our professional support team will handle the whole process for you until your website is up and running.
So VPS still remains accessible to most small and medium-sized businesses.
Dedicated Hosting
Understanding shared and VPS hosting, it should be quite obvious what dedicated hosting can provide. With this type of solution, a website will be given its own hardware and resources within a data center. That means no sharing and the highest possible level of performance and limitless customization.
Dedicated hosting is always more expensive than other solutions, but is essential for businesses with large websites and a high amount of monthly bandwidth. Businesses that host sensitive data will also rely on dedicated hosting for security and stability reasons.
By Understanding Hosting Solutions, The Choice Becomes Much Easier
- Shared hosting is the entry-level solution, providing good speed and stability, with the lowest possible cost. This is perfect for the smallest businesses with modest online needs, personal websites and small-sized blogs.
- VPS hosting remains within the affordable range for smaller businesses, but offers better speed and stability, with more potential customization. Initial setup may be more involved if the hosting provider doesn’t offer managed solutions.
- Dedicated hosting is the top tier of web hosting. Dedicated hardware and network resources offer the best performance and stability. Customization is only limited by the technical skill of the site owner (or their developer). The most expensive option and usually not necessary for small businesses.
Owning a website is easier than ever before, and there are solutions to meet any budget. With all of the growth potential that is offered from owning a website, there’s no reason for any business to miss out in 2018.
Get your hosting solution from HostRound at an affordable price and fully managed services with 99.999% uptime.