Comparing VPS and shared hosting

Why you may need hosting and which types of hosting exist

So, you’ve decided to create your own website. Maybe it will be the small online shop, news aggregator, or just your own blog, the extension for your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter account with advanced instruments for your creativity. But first, you have to register the domain name and choose the hosting for your future creation. Technically, you have some inexpensive variants of registering your own unique name and free options for web hosting, but if you need a fancy dot com and if you want your site to look a bit better than something created in the 1990s, you should consider investing into your dream.

Choosing the hosting company and type of hosting is one of the most important steps in the process of website creation. Good hosting will allow you to create a simple and generic, but nice looking and fully functioning site in just several mouse clicks, and there will be many options to improve and upgrade it if you want and have time to. Concerning the type of hosting, you have several options, which may be basically reduced to three:

• shared hosting;
• VPS hosting;
• dedicated hosting.

Features of shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting and which one should you choose.

If you are planning to create a real web portal with millions of users per day, then you should consider dedicated hosting. You’ll get your own server with all the bells and whistles, but it will cost you. A lot.

If your initial plans are a bit humbler, then it makes sense to consider either shared or VPS hosting. In general, shared hosting has exactly one benefit: it is cheaper. In the case of shared hosting, one physical server maintains the functioning of several or many websites, hundreds and thousands, actually. All these sites share limited resources of the server, like RAM, storage, processing power, and bandwidth. This usually means that your site on such a server will be slow and unresponsive, and it will be unavailable, if even just one of the sites will be under, for instance, a DDoS attack.

VPS hosting, on the other hand, is much more advanced. Here, again, several or many sites share the same physical server, but now you have your own Virtual Private Server, which is actually not so virtual. Let’s imagine a typical modern server. It may have like several Intel Xeons or AMD Threadrippers onboard, a couple of terabytes of RAM, and a couple of hundreds of terabytes of storage. Each of these Xeons and Threadrippers has dozens of real physical cores, each of which is actually a real separate powerful processor with two or even more threads, capable of processing many different tasks at the same time. So, using VPS hosting, you’ll get your own core, or two, or more, like 10 gigs of RAM and 50 gigs of storage, depending on your plan, which will be always available for your site. They will be used only when needed, and if not needed, the processing power and RAM will be used by the other sites on the server, but they will be always here for you, which means your site will be always fast and responsive, and any attack on the other sites on the server will not influence you. So, VPS hosting is a no-brainer for any important site, except for the extreme cases, where dedicated hosting is needed.

What is WordPress and why WordPress + VPS is a good idea

Finally, you need to choose the platform for your future site. It is still possible to create a website from scratch, but it is not what most people actually do. There are several widely spread platforms, that power most sites on the Internet, which allow creating and managing your webpage even if you have nothing to do with HTML or web design. And the most powerful and widespread of them all is WordPress. Currently, it powers almost 500 million websites around the world. Most reliable hosting providers allow you to use WordPress site builder, sometimes it is even the only option out there. There are thousands of templates for different types of WordPress sites, and many of them are even free. You may use one of them as a starting point for your own creation. What is also very important, is that there are thousands of plugins for WordPress, which allow adding your site a unique look: different kinds of graphs, tables, videos, fancy design, and much, much more. And many of them are free.

So, if you need a new website and don’t want to spend years on its creation, WordPress-optimized VPS hosting looks like a very good idea, indeed.