SHARED
Shared hosting is a popular option for businesses wanting to keep costs low. A shared web hosting provider will host multiple sites, owned by multiple customers on just one server. The website owners share the server operating costs, so pricing is lower than dedicated hosting or VPS, usually less than $10 per month. However, this affects the server’s ability to transfer data quickly or efficiently when your hosting neighbours have a traffic spike. This often leads to website crashes and limited scalability for business growth.
DEDICATED HOSTING:
Dedicated hosting allocates an entire server to your website so your business has total control over customising resources and software. No pooling of costs. No sharing of power. Sounds great, right? Except that it’s much more expensive - making it more suited to websites with robust technical demands. Dedicated hosting could be beneficial for:
- Websites with extremely high-traffic volume
- Sites handling large financial transactions
- High software customisation or control requirements
- Businesses needing a boutique or specific operating system
Dedicated hosting versus shared hosting represent the capitalist versus socialist hosting options.
VIRTUAL PRIVATE SERVERS (VPS)
In short, VPS represents the middle ground between shared and dedicated hosting.
VPS fences off guaranteed resources from one physical server, into multiple virtual machines or ‘servers’. This means that your website data is not shared with other server users - its private. Overall, the server power is shared, without the higher cost or jeopardy to website function.
The pros are:
- Cost effectiveness for websites outgrowing shared servers
- Customisation and control of server settings and software install.
- Scalability of resources like CPU cores, RAM and storage as traffic grows.
- Dedicated Bandwidth and disk space, ensuring reliable performance
- The cons are:
- Need for technical expertise to optimise server administration and function.
- Support and Maintenance may or may not be included in the VPS plan
- Improper allocation of resources
- Limited Hardware control - VPS users have a virtual server, not a real one!
If your website is running slow, has increasing traffic, throws up lots of server errors or needs new custom software, it may be time to consider switching to VPS.
CLOUD HOSTING:
Cloud hosting is about deploying and running websites, mobile or web apps, databases, and other services using virtualized, distributed and connected servers offered by cloud providers such as Microsoft, Umbraco, Amazon or Google.
Instead of owning your own physical VPS or dedicated server, you access shared computing resources managed by the cloud provider company. This means they take care of maintenance, security, software updates, and load balancing across global data centres.
This allows your business to leverage tremendous computing power, on demand.
The benefits of cloud hosting are:
- Scalability to handle spikes in traffic
- Redundancy and uptime with automatic failover
- Pay-as-you-go costs rather than fixed server expenses
- Access to enterprise-level infrastructure
- Superb collaboration from anywhere with internet access
With cloud hosting, you rent computing resources like storage, RAM, and CPU power from large data centre operators. This gives tremendous flexibility and power, allowing you to scale up or down your website hosting as needed. So instead of purchasing physical servers outright, you pay only for the amount of cloud resources you actually consume.
This “pay-as-you-go” approach avoids upfront capital expenditure, so your initial business overheads are minimised.
Cloud hosting models are unique in that they have a truly global computing foundation without the exorbitant cost or limited scalability of shared or VPS server models.