Understanding Key Differences Between Best Fit VPS and Other Hosting Plans

By Joy Mali

Choosing a right web hosting service is essential while starting a website, as web hosting affects not only speed and security, but also a search engine ranking of any website. With plethora of hosting providers and plans available, it can be puzzling as to which plan or service is right for you. One of the best ways to choose an ideal hosting service is to compare different services and find one which best suits your business needs. In this article, I’ve compared pricing plans and features of a popular hosting service VPS to other hosting services. First, let’s see what features of VPS hosting makes it popular among website owners:

• It is cheap as compared to dedicated and cloud hosting
• Its server can be customized to accurately meet the needs of clients
• It offers autonomous control in terms of bandwidth, software installation, memory, usage, and storage space
• You will get complete root access, so you can perform operations of the stand-alone dedicated server environment
• With a VPS server, the main server will be secured against most known attacks or security exploits
• Virtual private servers provide a wide variety of disaster recovery options and their disaster recovery is faster than any other hosting service
• It is easily upgradable

Here is the price comparison of VPS v/s other hosting services. The prices shown below are the approximate prices. These prices will give you a rough idea of pricing of VPS, shared and dedicated hosting services.

VPS v/s Shared Hosting

We can see that shared hosting prices are less as compare to VPS prices, but with less pricing you will also get limited features. In addition, there are many reasons which make VPS hosting better option than shared hosting. Following are some down-points of shared hosting which can be overcome by VPS hosting:

• Limited resources- The biggest problem with shared hosting is the limited resources at your disposal. Sharing a server means sharing system resources with other users of that server; therefore, each user has various restrictions on their service. For example, if one user uses a lot of traffic, email capabilities, CPU cycles, etc., other users on the same machine are likely to experience bad performance of hosting.
• Less Features- Shared servers are limited in features also. In shared hosting, you can’t install your own software (e.g. server side antivirus) in order to protect your website. You are only allowed to operate email and make changes to your blogs.
• Security issue- In a shared hosting environment, different websites share the same resources of a single server; therefore, it becomes difficult to protect it against security concerns both from outside and from the other websites themselves. Often, clients have access to PHP, Perl and shell accounts which makes it easy for a client to ‘Denial of Service’ all the other clients with a badly written program. Further, clients of shared hosting solutions often share an IP address with other clients. If one client is placed on a spam blacklist, then everybody else using the same IP will be blacklisted. Harmful data uploaded to any site can easily put your site at risk.

All above mentioned down-points of shared hosting can easily be overcome by best VPS hosting, like:

• More resources– Virtual private servers are allotted memory and disk space independent of other allocations on the hardware node. Further,the hard limits are laid down for each virtual environment and enhanced capabilities of monitoring minimize the opportunities for a single user’s activity to impact activities of other users.
• More features- VPS hosting provides more features as compared to the shared hosting. All features of VPS hosting are mentioned above.
• More security- VPS hosting is inherently more secure as compare to share hosting. Its virtual environments have independent file systems. The administrators of VPS hosting are empowered to implement secure configurations.

VPS v/s Dedicated Hosting

It is clearly seen that dedicated hosting plans are more costly than VPS hosting plans. With the high cost of dedicated hosting, you will also get features like high performance, reliability, optimum speed, easy accessibility, and maximum security. Dedicated hosting is also known for some drawbacks, like:

• High cost and maintenance– The main disadvantage of dedicated hosting is its expensive plans. Dedicated servers are fully dedicated to one or more websites owned by the same individual.
• Complicated- Dedicated hosting is also complex than other types of server. Maintaining, setting up and repairing a dedicated server can be a challenge for website owners. Therefore; before switching to dedicated hosting, most businesses use Linux VPS hosting owing to its technical factors.
• More technical requirements- To set up a dedicated server and handle a hosted website; you need to have extensive knowledge of networking. Some of the things you need to be familiar with include server mechanisms, IP routing, MX records and others. If you are not well aware with these skills, you have to hire a network administrator or dedicated server administrator to manage your server.

Above mentioned cons of dedicated hosting can be overcome by VPS hosting, like:

• Low cost and maintenance– VPS hosting has low cost and maintenance than dedicated hosting. In addition, there is no downtime caused by hardware maintenance in VPS servers. Before any maintenance in VPS host machine, it can be cloned to a different host that allows the site to continue operating with zero downtime.
• Less technical knowledge– VPS is the best option for those people who have a little IT knowledge. In addition, you will get 24X7 assistance on any query.

VPS v/s Cloud Hosting

As we can see that Cloud hosting plans are quite expensive as compare to VPS hosting because in cloud hosting you have to shoulder the cost of the hardware, installation, set-up, and maintenance. Cloud hosting is acknowledged for high resources and instant scalability, but it also has some cons such as:

• Less security- the primary concern that users have with the cloud hosting is security of data. When you store your data in the cloud, you totally depend on the third party to safeguard your data. It means that your precious data could be vulnerable to cyber criminals and unauthorized users. Your data needs password protection and high-security encryption to remain safe from hackers.
• Pay more for more resource- Another disadvantage of cloud hosting is that you have to pay more if you use more resources. Some people find the inconsistent bill hard on the pocket.
• No real time support– Depending on what service provider you chose, you may be all alone when you need any technical help. So, I suggest you to choose a VPS hosting service provider that can provide you the real time support.

All above disadvantages can be overcome in VPS hosting such as it provides more security at less cost. Also, you don’t have to pay more for more resources, as you’ll get fixed resources which you can upgrade anytime.

VPS hosting is definitely the best option for those who:

• Need an affordable hosting service
• Have little IT knowledge
• Require greater resources than shared hosting
• Have a high traffic to their websites
• Need control over every aspect of their server
• Need high performance and stability
• Require unlimited outgoing emails

I advise you to choose only reputed and renowned VPS hosting service provider so that you can avail all the above mentioned VPS features and enhance the performance, security and traffic of your website.

Joy Mali is a certified digital analyst who helps online businesses to perform better on the web with best solutions & advice. Her content is featured on many mainstream sites & blogs. You can follow her on Google plus.