What is the difference between VPS and shared hosting?

Rohan Mathew

Updated on:

Are you planning to launch your own online project? Decide what best suits your site’s needs. Perhaps best email hosting is for you. When it comes to larger platforms, you will need more bandwidth. We also want to visually show you a comparison of VPS vs shared hosting.

Features of shared hosting

Shared hosting can be compared to a communal apartment. Each client has his own room (tariff plan), but there are common rooms.

Shared hosting means that one physical server simultaneously serves many sites of different clients and all server resources (processor, RAM) are shared between these clients and their sites. This allows you to significantly reduce the price of the service while maintaining the basic required hosting parameters.

Click here – How to Improve Your Personal Style in 2021

On shared option, we recommend hosting sites with low traffic (up to 1000 visitors per day). These can be business card sites, blogs, small corporate sites, and so on.

Features of VPS hosting

VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server) allows creating virtual machines based on one physical server that emulate a separate physical server. Each of these machines has guaranteed system resources, an isolated file system, root access, a dedicated IP address, and the ability to install almost any software.

If we compare it with a dwelling, then a VPS is an analogue of an apartment in a multi-storey building, where there are all the necessary amenities and there is no need to share them with neighbors.

We recommend choosing this type for sites with high traffic or with a large amount of data, as well as web projects with non-standard software configuration.

Check website status before we cover the highlights.

Purpose

Both types provide the main in-demand features for your sites:

  • PHP;
  • Python;
  • Perl;
  • Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL;
  • Ruby on Rails;
  • Python frameworks Pylons, Django, TurboGears, Zope.

The number of sites that can be hosted varies:

  • VPS hosting – unlimited, depends only on the VPS parameters (processor, memory, disk).
  • Shared one – limited to the tariff plan.

Website speed and load carrying capacity

VPS – guaranteed performance. You choose the required parameters yourself. The percentage of memory provided depends on the processor core, number of cores, RAM. You can select the required parameters when testing VPS or change them later at any time.

Shared hosting – processor resources provided to each client are not limited. They are distributed among all sites located on this server.

Click here – Smart Ways to Finance Your Car

Memory size

VPS – as in the case of processor resources, you choose how much memory your virtual server needs and you can change the parameters. Some of the memory goes to the operating system and other system services.

Shared hosting – the allocated memory for each executed script / web application is limited by the tariff plan.

It is worth noting that if several scripts are running simultaneously under your virtual hosting account, this amount of memory is allocated to everyone, and not divided among all scripts. Powerful equipment allows it.

Administration

VPS require some knowledge of administration or the involvement of a specialist is required from a VPS user, because you manage your own server. This problem can be solved by ordering the Advanced VPS Administration service.

Virtual hosting means that all work on maintaining the server, its administration is performed by the provider’s staff.

Additional expenses

VPS requires additional investments. This is true even your site is not very resource-demanding. Various software runs on the virtual server: control panel, web server, mail server, the operating system itself. Consider this when choosing server options.

Shared hosting does not require any overhead.

Backup

VPS copies once a day to external storage with a storage depth of 1 day. You can restore the entire image. These possibilities can be expanded upon agreement.

Shared hosting – daily full backup with a depth of at least 7 days. You can restore the entire site as a whole, or a separate database or file. The control panel allows you to further customize your personal backup schedule.

Control Panel

VPS is provided by ISPConfig or any one of your choice for an additional fee.

Shared one allows you to work with Parallels Plesk. This is one of the most convenient and powerful panels in terms of its capabilities. Thanks to the use of APS packages and simple mail management, customers love it.

Safety

VPS is your own server. You have root access. You can change the access passwords yourself. You define your own security policy.

Shared hosting is managed by the provider. Thanks to a clear security policy, 24/7 monitoring and the use of SSL certificates to ensure secure connections and protect your data, the level of protection is maintained at a high level.

Conclusions:

So, what should you prefer when considering shared hosting vs VPS options? With large disk volumes, it is more profitable, but not significantly, to purchase a VPS.

If you cannot administer the VPS or want to reduce the time you spend on maintaining your server, choose virtual hosting or VPS with the Advanced Administration service.

If you need a guaranteed speed of work with high traffic (for example, 10.000 unique visitors per day), VPS hosting is recommended.

This does not mean that your site on a shared hosting will work slower than on a VPS with a minimum configuration, but a VPS with a properly configured configuration will provide guaranteed performance.