Your website speed directly depends on the web hosting service you rely on, and web hosts have different capacities and scalability options. The most common types of web hosting include shared web hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting.
Although shared web hosting is the cheapest and most popular solution, we won’t consider it in this article because it doesn’t provide enough capabilities to ensure a stable website and consistent speed. Instead, we’ll focus on VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting and explain why you might choose one over the others.
Virtual Private Servers A virtual private server is the golden mean between an extremely cheap shared web hosting package and expensive dedicated hosting. VPS providers offer a personal virtual server for each client, which is more configurable and scalable than shared hosting since your configurations don’t influence other clients (as they do with shared hosting).
Also, VPS prices are affordable, though they may go up if your website scales and requires additional services. A VPS is an optimal solution for websites with average traffic.Thanks to their scalability, virtual private servers are also great for ecommerce sites that expect traffic spikes during certain periods. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DigitalOcean are examples of common cloud computing services that offer hosting, storage, computing, and other solutions for online businesses.
Cloud Hosting You might question if there’s any difference between a VPS and cloud hosting, as both are based on cloud infrastructure. They are, however, different: with cloud hosting, computing resources are spread across multiple servers. This makes cloud hosting highly scalable − you can increase or decrease the computing resources for your application depending on the load it faces. Many cloud hosting providers offer autoscaling, which means the platform automatically allocates more resources to your application in case of traffic spikes. Also, cloud hosting is reliable − computing resources are located across multiple physical servers, so if one fails, your application will keep running.
Pricing is another advantage of cloud hosting. Since computing resources are flexible, with cloud hosting you pay only for what you use. Providers offer both monthly and hourly rates and charge for additional resources your application might use. Therefore, with cloud hosting you don’t need to pay for resources that your website doesn't need. As a downside, you might end up receiving a hefty bill if your website experiences a prolonged traffic spike.
Cloud hosting is a great choice for small and medium-sized businesses that run applications with unpredictable traffic (which is common for ecommerce websites). Providers can offer cloud hosting plans tailored to specific types of applications. For example, if you need hosting for your ecommerce website running on the Magento platform, you can go for Magento web hosting that will help you better manage your application and enhance its performance.
Dedicated Hosting Dedicated hosting provides you with a dedicated server – a physical server that belongs only to you. This is an expensive solution. First, you pay to rent a server. Second, you need a system administrator to maintain and manage your server. However, with dedicated hosting you get resources and power that are all yours. Also, you can customize basically everything, from your operating system to the type of memory. Dedicated hosting is recommended for enterprise-grade websites and high-traffic websites where stability and speed are critical.
The Bottom Line So what web hosting package should you choose? The answer is simple: consider your business needs.
Cloud hosting is an excellent choice for businesses that need a highly scalable, flexible, and reliable platform to host their applications on. At the same time, cloud hosting offers fewer management and configuration opportunities than a VPS or dedicated hosting.
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A VPS is the optimal solution for small and medium-sized businesses with a decent number of website visitors. For example, popular web hosting provider Hostgator offers VPS plans that allow you to handle from 9,000 to 35,000 visitors per day, which makes a VPS a true competitor to dedicated hosting. In addition to providing a baseline of necessary computing resources (memory, storage, processing) to keep a full-fledged and stable website functioning, you can add as many additional resources as you want over time to scale your hosting as your business grows. This feature is useful during seasonal bursts of traffic when your website is hit by unexpected volumes of visitors.
VPS and dedicated hosting can each handle over a million visitors per month, which is why dedicated hosting is reasonable only in cases when you require greater flexibility to tweak your hosting environment and have the staff to maintain your own server.
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