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One of the first challenges of wanting to create a website and choice of hosting, after all, this environment will be the basis for the page to run with good performance. Contrary to what many beginners might imagine, when we talk about hosting we are not referring to something static and standardized. There are several types of hosting, which can serve different types of sites, according to size and need for resources.
In this post, we are going to cover two of the most popular options, the shared hosting and VPS. The first is the most popular option among hosting, being the cheapest. The second is an option that gives the manager more freedom and performance and, due to its exclusivity, ends up being a little more expensive.
In the lines below we provide an overview of these two types of accommodation, their differences and characteristics. Want to know which is the best hosting: shared or VPS? Keep reading!
What is shared hosting?
The name “shared hosting” clearly indicates the main feature of this type of environment. In it, customers share the same server and its resources — processing, disk space and memory.
So that you can understand how it works, shared hosting is like an apartment in a condominium. You have your own private space in your apartment, but all parts of the building are shared and the cost of maintenance is divided between the residents. The elevator, the pool, the party area, the sports court and what is shared will be charged at the condominium.
Shared hosting works the same way, all server maintenance courses are divided between customers, which helps to dilute the price and make this model the cheapest hosting.
Although this sharing offers the benefit of a lower price, for more robust sites that need more bandwidth, this environment does not end up being the most suitable, after all, you will be sharing resources with other sites that can end up generating a lot of traffic and slowing down the server. Therefore, the choice of shared hosting is indicated when:
- when you are working with smaller sites or blogs;
- when the site is for a medium or small business;
- when your budget for website creation and maintenance is limited;
- when the user is a beginner and doesn’t know much about web development and maintaining websites on servers.
What is VPS hosting?
VPS is the acronym for Virtual Private Server, or Virtual Private Server, in Portuguese. In this type of environment, users also share a server, but resources are individual.
This means that other sites hosted on the same server will not affect yours, as you will be working with dedicated resources — which guarantees that the contracted resources will always be available to you.
This exclusivity makes the VPS price a little more expensive than shared hosting, but the cost benefit compensates for larger projects. In general, VPS hosting is indicated in cases such as:
- you have plans to expand your business and website in the future;
- you have a budget that allows you to invest in a robust platform for your website;
- your site has a high projection of traffic in the future and you don’t want to run the risk of having to migrate servers at peak times.
What are the benefits of VPS hosting?
The first benefit of VPS hosting is root access to the server, an advantage for more advanced users who need to make more in-depth configurations. Another benefit is the VPS scalabilitywhich gives the user the opportunity to grow their site by purchasing more memory and bandwidth.
One advantage we need to highlight is the fact that your site is not affected by traffic from other pages, which delivers more stability and speed on average than shared hosting.
How to identify the right time to migrate to VPS?
Your site is on shared hosting, you are satisfied with the performance, but you believe that, with the growth projections, you will soon have to upgrade to VPS hosting. The big question is: when is the time to make that change?
It is important to keep this in mind so that your upgrade is not left for the last minute, when shared hosting is no longer working and you end up having your traffic harmed. Among the points you need to analyze about the need to make an early upgrade are:
- Do you need greater freedom to manage your server right away?
- Do your projections indicate an increase in future traffic that could happen sooner than expected?
- Do you intend to have more than one website, thus creating a portal with several pages, such as e-commerce, apps, among others?
No matter what the reason, when identifying an opportunity or a risk of running out of resources needed at peak times, it’s only worth upgrading with a focus on cost-benefit. Basically, you will be making an investment so that the growth of your site has the necessary support to happen naturally.
What are the other types of hosting?
The focus of our post is to identify the differences between shared and VPS hosting. Although, there are other types of environments that can be used for hosting websites and web applications. Among the most popular options we can highlight cloud hosting and dedicated hosting.
Dedicated hosting, as the name suggests, is the hosting model in which the user has an exclusive server for his website. That way, he has the freedom to configure it the way he sees fit, without the need to share it with nobody.
Cloud hosting uses cloud computing to offer hosting that uses multiple servers to balance traffic. In this model, several machines work as if it were a single systemtaking advantage of available resources in a unified way.
In this hosting model, the user now has redundancy, as the site is in a cluster that allows the work of several servers, and when one fails, the other helps to keep the site up.
We hope that, after reading this post, you will have a basis for choose the best server for your website: shared or VPS hosting. Understanding which is the best environment for your web application is the first step to achieve success in your endeavor.
Another important point is the choice of hosting provider, after all we are talking about the company that will provide the environment for your website, becoming a business partner. Choose a provider that offers plans compatible with your demand, full-time qualified support and the possibility of a free trial.
Did you like the post? Want to know how to get the best hosting for your website? Get in touch with us and find out about our plans.
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