Choosing hosting plan is a million dollar question for a novice. A difficult decision for someone who does not have knowledge of technical intricacies. To make the matter worse, there are confusing marketing pitches from every vendor on internet. Let us avoid all that chaos and make it simple. There are mainly three types of hosting one need to look at. Shared, VPS and dedicated hosting.
Why so many types of hosting?
Hosting refers to the infrastructure you are going to use to publish your web application/ website on internet. To accomplish this task, you need various resources namely web servers, memory, hard disk space, network bandwidth etc.
Based on demand of your application, the resources need to be provisioned. If you are able to judge the need of resources fairly well, you can easily choose the type. Now, what all factors affects the resource consumption? They are number of visitors for your website, kind of files you are using like text files or media files, complexity of the computation done at the backend etc.
Hence many different types of hosting were created based on the resource consumption pattern. And obviously the cost.
Shared Versus VPS versus Dedicated Hosting
| Property | Shared hosting | VPS hosting | Dedicated hosting |
| Performance/speed | Lowest | Better than shared | Best in the category |
| Scalability | Very limited | Generally good for midsize | Almost unlimited |
| Sharing | Many sharing one server | Some sharing a server | No sharing |
| Isolation | Zero. | Better isolation due to virtualization | Best isolation |
| Security | Low | High | Best |
| Control on configuration | Almost no control. | Limited control | Complete control |
| Pricing | Cheapest | Medium | Highest |
When to go for Shared hosting
When you want to start your journey of online business, shared hosting is a good option. This would give you valuable experience in terms of performance and reach of your business. This will help you choose a better hosting option based on your need of growth.
If you are looking for some thousands users per month, with simple functionality of information sharing like blog, shared hosting can be the best option.
When to choose VPS
In VPS type of hosting, a big server is divided into multiple smaller servers using a technique called virtualization. We can imagine that your web application is being hosted on one of the mini servers called virtual machine. Here you have a choice of operating system, high speed storage like SSDs.
VPS is most suitable for the websites which need to cater to thousands of users per week or when some complex calculation involved at the backend for every user. Typically, when you start getting performance issues for your shared hosting, you can consider VPS. The migration is justified as your business and number of users would grow. Secondly, Virtual private server provide better isolation from the security point of view from other websites hosted on the same server. VPS is the best of fast growing websites.
VPS is costlier than shared hosting but costs lesser than dedicated.
When to go for dedicated hosting
For large business website which is serving many customers, dedicated server is the best. When website receive traffic over 4 to 5 lac visitors per month, a dedicated server would be able to handle this kind of traffic.
If security is one of the top concerns for you, dedicated hosting is the choice for you.
To avail all the benefits of dedicated hosting, you need a good technical administrator to manage your server.
Choose right hosting plan with Magicworkshost
If you have questions or queries about how to choose hosting plans for your website or are frustrated with your existing webhosting plan, connect with Magicworkshost. We can help you alleviate all your hosting issues and address the technical concerns quickly and importantly, at the best price.
