Not all hosting is the same and comes in 2 main types.
The largest type of hosting is ‘Shared Hosting’, where often hundreds of websites and customers share the same server. This is not often a problem as users are each on their own account and do not have permission to see each other’s sites, but can compete for servers resources.
VPS hosting is the next level upward with each customer on their own ‘virtual server’. This increases security, provides more consistent performance and can allow greater flexibility on how the server is configured depending on the provider. This is beneficial for larger or higher profile sites that cannot afford interruptions and can justify the increased costs.
Shared Hosting Advantages:
- Very Affordable starting from a couple of dollars a month
- Almost always very user friendly with with good functionality out of the box
- Updated, licenced and underlying infrastructure maintained by hosting provider
- Support avaliable from hosting provider for basic issues or questions
Shared Hosting Disadvantages
- Limited customisation and access to the underlying Operating System
- Resources are shared – Oversubscribed servers and problematic customers can cause the server slowdowns or crash’s
- Outbound email’s may frequently be marked as spam if sharing an outbound IP address for email
- Service provide might suspend you without warning if your site is causing issues for other users, such as a compromised contact form sending spam, or malfunction consuming excessive resources
- Misconfiguration, software flaw or accidental error could expose your information to other users on the same server (rare)
VPS Advantages
- Dedicated CPU, Memory, Disk IO and Database resources
- Consistent performance throughout the day
- Increased reliability and less likelihood of your server being intentionally disrupted
- Providers will be less likely to suspend you for higher than adverage resource usage
- Ability to customise it: Open/Close Ports, install additional services, or change settings
- Dedicated IP which can reduced the likelihood of the website being blocked and emails going to spam
- WHM access & Ability to host multiple individual cPanel accounts (depending on the provider)
- More control over scheduled maintainance (updates, reboots, major upgrades)
- Increased Security as you are not sharing the server with other users
VPS Disadvantages
- Often several times more expensive per month than Shared Hosting due to servers and licencing costs not being able to be spread over as many people
- Server failure may go unnoticed for longer
- Ensure your VPS offers support and backups
- May not include all licencing costs
