We frequently get phone calls asking what platform is best for a site. Does it make sense to host your site on shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated server? Well, the answer is yes. They all make sense, but you need to find the right fit.
What makes sense for my site?
Let’s start by giving you an idea of what you’re getting into. It helps that the names are nothing more than descriptions of what each hosting plan is. Shared hosting is exactly that – it’s a lot of customers sharing a server. A VPS is a virtual private server – it’s a virtualized server that adds a degree of privacy from shared hosting but isn’t quite a dedicated server. A dedicated server is, as the name would suggest, a server dedicated to you.
I love analogies so lets throw one of those in. If a dedicated server is like a house, then a VPS would be an apartment in an apartment building, and shared hosting would be a bunch of bunks in a single room. That analogy carries pretty well, lets look at it a little more in depth over our next few blog posts.
Shared Hosting
If someone in a room full of bunks gets sick, you’re quite likely to get sick because you’re in such close quarters. Similarly, if a rogue site gets stuck in a while(1) loop and it’s on the same shared hosting server as yours, it can take your site down temporarily. It’s just the nature of what you’re buying, it’s susceptible to problems caused by other people because there are no rigid barriers between you and other customers. That said, it’s a very economical option and it’s great for most sites.
On shared hosting, we don’t update software versions unless it’s a security update. We’re often asked why and the answer is pretty straightforward – if we make an update from Apache 1.6 to Apache 2.0 or PHP4 to PHP5, it can break a lot of sites. We’ll always do security updates, but we don’t always do functionality updates. It’s not because we don’t want to, it’s because we need to keep the environment as stable and consistent as possible. Ubiquity Hosting possesses the technology to circumvent this problem on a regular basis - we can let you pick your software version for a lot of software, but we can’t always do it.
Pros: Inexpensive, adequate for most sites, cheap to maintain.
Cons: Can go down when it’s not your fault, not great for a large site, limited permission levels, can’t update all software
Check out next week’s post for information about VPS servers and dedicated servers.
Tags: dedicated server, shared hosting, vps, webhosting