As both the consumer and the industry have matured, the packages & features offered by web hosting companies have also evolved. Today, there is a wide variety of web hosting and even more sub-divisions that can be overwhelming even for a technical person. In this article of Know your web hosting, we will explain the difference between VPS hosting and shared hosting. This will help you in deciding your web hosting correctly the next time around.
The main difference between VPS Hosting and Shared Hosting is the way the web servers are configured. Both hosting types allow a single web server to be shared by many clients. What separates them is that in VPS hosting, the web server is partitioned in such a way that each partition serves as Virtual Dedicated Server allowing for maximum freedom and functionality to a web hosting client. On the other hand, shared web hosting plans operate on a single web server with a single operating system and multiple websites sharing its resources. This means that Virtual Private Server share just hardware resources whereas in shared hosting all resources like hardware and software are shared. This increases the probability of server crash.
The Virtual Private Server (VPS) is designed to be cheaper than a dedicated web server, by allowing multiple clients to share the hardware resources of one computer, yet with a high level of privacy and insulation for each client. This separation is achieved by running a complete separate operating system for each customer. Each VPS client has a root level access and enjoys many advantages of a dedicated server, at a much economical prices. Each Virtual Private Server has its own IP address, users, groups, ports, firewall rules, files, and libraries. Except for hardware very little of software resources are shared, increasing the reliability of web hosting. Read more...
Shared hosting is often referred to as cheap, economical, budget, or personal web hosting. Any of these terms generally refer to shared web hosting. Shared web hosting is the most popular type of web hosting in the hosting market today with literally thousand of hosting providers in North America alone. Due to the low cost, budget web hosting is the hosting of choice for most personal and small business websites.
Shared web hosting refers to a server configuration where many web sites share a single server and all its associated resources including disk space, processing power, and RAM (memory). Costs are lower than other hosting solutions because the cost of server acquisition and maintenance is shared amongst all the websites on that server.
Terminology
Often though, you will not see a web hosting company offering “Shared Web Hosting.” This is because shared hosting has some distinct disadvantages that the hosting companies do not want to advertise. That is why instead of shared, you will see terms like budget, or economical. The shared hosting packages offered by shared hosting providers are often given names like Starter, Personal, or Basic. Even words like Bronze, Silver and Gold plans usually indicate shared hosting plans. If the hosting plan does not specifically sat it’s a VPS (Virtual Private Server) plan or a dedicated server plan, then it is most likely shared web hosting.
Platforms and Software
Shared hosting is available on both Linux and Windows platforms, though not all hosting providers offer both. Some websites require one or the other depending on the server technologies used to develop the website. For example, ASP.NET is a server side scripting language used to develop database driven websites. Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) is a Microsoft database product. If you want to use these on your website you need to use Windows hosting because they are not supported by Linux. There are, however, equally powerful solutions for developing database driven sites on Linux such as PHP and MySQL, the core of many open source content management systems (CMS) like Drupal and Joomla. Read more...
After designing of website next important thing is to get it hosted on the internet. The task is not at easy as there are so many companies offering various types of web hosting packages like shared web hosting, dedicated web hosting, managed web hosting etc. Now the problem is which one to use?
In general it is considered a good idea to go for shared web hosting if the user is in a small business and wants to save cost. However before finalizing the deal it is good to know what is shared web hosting service and what are the merits and demerits of shared web hosting.
Defining shared hosting:
If extremely high performance and high bandwidth are not the points in question, then shared web hosting service can be a most convenient and economic way of hosting web sites.. As name implies, in case of shared web hosting service, the web server that hosts the web pages is shared by several other websites. Talking about number of websites on a shared hosting server, they can be in thousands. Now due to the fact that just one server is fulfilling the requirements of many other websites, the plus point is they can offer cheap prices for their server.
As there are so many websites hosted on a single web server, still there is no pint of worry for the user as the web hosting providers will not compromise on any kind of security and performance issues in case of shared hosting servers. Not only that, shared hosting web servers are operated, monitored and look after around the clock by IT professionals, so as to minimize server downtimes.
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