The shared hosting vs VPS hosting comparison is one many people face when choosing a web hosting solution and also a partner. Shared hosting differs from VPS hosting in some fundamental resource management issues which are key to your web application performance. It is therefore important that you know the differences and your needs to decide whether you should use a virtual private server or a shared hosting server.
Shared hosting is a hosting solution where more websites run on a single server through resource sharing and virtualization. Choosing a shared hosting means you’ll be sharing a server with other websites. Shared hosting is cheap as compared to VPS hosting because of resource sharing. Each website has its own resource limit. Many WordPress hosting solutions offer shared hosting as their primary market product since WordPress is easy to install and manage on shared hosting. Shared hosting is ideal when you want to host a small business website or a small blog that doesn’t consume much bandwidth.
- Shared hosting is the cheapest hosting solution. Zimhero web hosting offers cheap and fully featured shared hosting plans in Zimbabwe. The prices start at US3.17 per month to US6.17 which is cheap as compared to other hosting partners in ZImbabwe.
- A shared hosting server comes with a control panel that is intuitive to use. An example being cPanel which enables you to visually manage your email accounts and website files.
- No server maintenance fees are required. All the software updates are done by the hosting partner.
- You can easily upgrade to other hosting plans.
- Shared hosting plans can be a bit slower than virtual private servers. However, this is not always the case, website speed is depended on a number of factors like the programming language used and how the website was designed.
- Since you’re sharing the server with other websites, your site can be deprived of computing resources.
- You don’t have the customization level that a person operating a VPS or dedicated server has. The shell access is jailed, meaning you’re only allowed to run limited commands in the shell.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
A VPS server is a virtual machine, just like your laptop. You can install whatever you want on it. It runs it’s own operating system that you can have superuser level of access and has it’s own system files that are not shared with any other website or application. With a VPS, you can install any software you want on the system.
Advantages of VPS Hosting
- Reliability – Your system performance is not dependent on other server instances since there is no resource sharing. Other shared hosting instances (websites) can affect your hosting performance.
- Customization/ Freedom – A VPS gives you the freedom to install any software you want. You also can upgrade and downgrade without any problems.
- Root access – The root access is the most important thing for any developer. A VPS comes with root access and you can run commands using your operating system utilities.
