If you think about it in the context of a VPS being an independent room in a hotel, and a shared server being a large dorm room with bunk beds, you’ll soon realize when you should choose which one for your website.
You’d choose a bed in a dorm room when you’re looking to save costs, and share common resources, and you’d choose a private room when you need independence, scalability, privacy and quality living.
Similarly, you’d choose a VPS when your website needs a dedicated private server, allowing it to remain unaffected by the occurrences of surrounding websites. You get resources dedicated to your website, allowing you the ability to scale at your wish.
You’d choose a shared server when you want to save the costs of hosting your website, and you’re fine with sharing RAM, space, speed, bandwidth and other capabilities. When deciding the way to go, we recommend looking into the different operating systems available for shared hosting. One aspect worth taking into account is the overall enhanced security of working with the best Linux hosting.
It all makes sense, doesn’t it?
Let’s first talk about why you should choose VPS hosting:
Security: With your own private server, your website is obviously more secure. If you’d like protection from viruses, bugs, privacy attacks, choose VPS.
Speed: Your website is bound to work faster when it’s on a VPS. With dedicated resources to its benefit, it builds a very conducive environment for the website to work speedily, with less technical glitches and hiccups that usually slow the speed down.
Enhanced Customer Experience: Building on the above 2 factors of speed and security, your customers would inevitably get a better customer experience, if your website is on a VPS. Navigation will be smoother, while preventing various errors from happening.
More Control: With your website hosted on a VPS, you’ll have additional control over your server/hosting settings, enabling you to adapt to customer needs effectively.
Payments Compliance: If you’re building or hosting an online store, you need to make sure your customers payment details are completely secure and need to pass a PCI (Payment Compliance Industry) check. Being on a VPS will help with passing the check.
VPS Hosting by HostPapa
To understand this from a business perspective, if you’re a small business owner, for example, a plumber, who has a website that gets little traffic, mostly just to showcase your services and contact information, shared hosting would work better. It’s cheaper, with pricing usually being between $3 & $10 a month, and you need no technical skills to manage your server.
With shared hosting, you wouldn’t have to worry about the security of your server, or anything to do with its administration, as your hosting provider will be responsible for all of that. This frees up your time to focus on your business!
But, imagine if you’re a large eCommerce business selling hundreds of products online. You’ll be receiving large volumes of traffic on your website, with people paying online to buy your products. In this scenario, shared hosting would be highly inappropriate, and VPS hosting would be an absolute necessity!
Given that we’re focusing on VPS Hosting for this article, let’s now look into which VPS service provider you should choose from the range of options out there.
