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. Last week we gave an overview of your options and then reviewed shared hosting as an option and weighed the pros and cons. This week we’ll cover another option, VPS (Virtual Private Server).
Virtual Private Server
Using our analogy from last week, if a dedicated server is a house, a VPS is an apartment, and shared hosting is a room full of bunks. A VPS is a general term for a virtual machine. In laymen terms, it’s taking a big resource (a dedicated server), and using software to break it into several pretend machines. It’s like taking a big office space, putting up cubical walls, and calling all of the new space offices. They look and feel like offices, but lets face it – we all know they’re just cubicles…you can hear the buzz of the rest of the office moving around, you don’t have 100% privacy, and you’re all breathing the same air.
A VPS is an extra degree of separation from other users when compared to shared hosting. The example we used last week, a while(1) loop in another customer’s code, won’t break your site on a VPS. The downside is that sometimes they’re too small for their own good. A VPS with 512mb of memory actually burns up a significant amount of that memory running the OS and cPanel (the control panel running your site). So it’s possible, on a technical level, for your site to perform worse on a VPS than on shared hosting if you don’t purchase the right VPS. Don’t be afraid of doing that if you talk to our sales department – we’re excellent coaches when it comes to helping you pick which hosting plan is right for you.
Something else worth mentioning is that unlike shared hosting, you can pick your software versions. What to use a slightly dated version of Apache because a new version dropped a feature? Sure, we can manage that. Want to hold off up upgrading ruby on rails? No problem.
Pros: cheaper than dedicated server, private, can change software versions, can reboot at free will
Cons: it’s easy to buy one that’s too small, still not 100% independent from other customers, low resources mean some things like ffmpeg can be sluggish at best
Check out next week’s post for the third installment of this series with information about dedicated servers.Tags: dedicated server, shared hosting, vps, webhosting