Which To Select for Your Website

As your corporation grows, your website’s hosting requirements change. While shared hosting could have been sufficient within the early days, high-growth businesses often must upgrade their hosting plans. 

With shared hosting, server resources are at a premium, and when your corporation’s continued success relies on having a fast-loading website, sharing hardware resources with other firms could be dangerous. 

So, what kind of hosting solution do you upgrade to to your company’s protection?

The essential options for hosting upgrades are virtual private servers (VPS) and dedicated servers. Although the words private and dedicated might indicate that these server types are quite similar, they’ve some key differences.  

Let’s compare VPS vs dedicated servers and hosting and review their essential differences.  

Here’s what’s discussed:

Before diving into the various server types to your hosting needs, let’s explore the risks of staying with shared hosting as an alternative of upgrading to a VPS or dedicated server. 

A number of beginners and small businesses launch an internet site with shared hosting, and rightly so. It’s a cheap option that can work well for a lot of web sites.

But as your organization grows, your website traffic increases and your website becomes more complex, and there may come a degree if you outgrow your shared hosting plan. Your website might reach the resource limits of a shared hosting plan, or you could experience performance deterioration, which is a component and parcel of unmanaged or managed hosting on a shared server.

With shared hosting, server resources are limited and usually not equally distributed. When one website on a server pulls extra CPU power or RAM, other web sites on the server can experience slow load times and even downtime. It’s like a giant litter of puppies competing for food from one bowl: some puppies get to the food first and fill their bellies, while others fight over scraps or go hungry. 

With shared hosting, you’ll need a keen eye to discover performance issues before your website visitors do. And while it has some benefits, shared hosting doesn’t lend itself well to scalability.    

In contrast, if you’ve gotten a managed VPS Hosting plan with Liquid Web and server resources are tight, you possibly can resize to a bigger server instance, meaning your website can easily weather the storm during high-traffic periods. 

Whenever you need more resources than a shared plan can provide, consider leveling as much as a brand new plan or server setup that fulfills your website’s potential. Let’s have a look at the fundamental setup of VPSs and dedicated servers to see how they profit high-traffic web sites.      

A dedicated server is a physical machine utilized by you alone. A VPS acts like a physical server, but it surely’s actually a dedicated virtual machine that’s part of a bigger physical server or cluster of servers.

In the event you’re planning on increasing your hosting budget to get a VPS or dedicated server, you’re actually not alone — in line with a Statista report, enterprise spending on cloud services in 2022 reached $225 billion, which is a rise of over 25% from 2021.  

During your seek for VPS and dedicated hosting plans, you may have come across different proprietary names for the varied VPS and dedicated hosting plans available. Here’s how these different server configurations work in motion:

For VPS plans, a hosting company divides a complete physical server into sections, and every section is rented out to different clients. 

How does this work? A hypervisor software program partitions server resources into different virtual machines on a physical server. This process is often called virtualization.

Whenever you upgrade to a VPS, the disadvantages of shared hosting exit the window. You’ll have specific server resources, similar to bandwidth, completely dedicated to your website. 

The virtualization layer in a VPS signifies that your website’s server space and resources are protected against other web sites hosted in several areas of the server. So, if an internet site on the identical server as your website is seeing increased traffic, similar to during a vacation sale or viral marketing campaign, your website’s performance won’t be degraded. 

On this respect, VPSs have a way more equitable division of resources than basic shared hosting servers. 

Although various VPS hosting types can be found, the 2 essential options are traditional VPS and cloud VPS. The normal VPS, dedicated virtual space on a bigger physical server, is what was previously described.

If you’ve gotten a cloud VPS plan, as an alternative of renting space on a portion of a single server, you get access to space on a series of connected servers. Attributable to the substantial resources available on interconnected cloud servers, cloud VPS hosting is a pretty option for website owners who wish to scale up rapidly when needed. 

If shared hosting is like having multiple roommates and a VPS is your personal apartment, then a dedicated server is sort of a standalone house. With a complete server to yourself, there isn’t any shared space or unequal division — your website can use all of your server’s resources.

Generally, a dedicated hosting plan gives you complete control of your server’s hardware and unrestricted access to your server’s space for storing. That said, no server has unlimited capability. 

But you possibly can upgrade to a server cluster in case you reach your dedicated server’s resource limits. A server cluster is a bunch of servers operating as one entity under a single IP address to permit nearly unlimited scaling. 

ALT: Enterprise hosting at Liquid Web.

Under these hosting options, your website gets a 100% uptime guarantee, Acronis cyber backups, and available PCI compliance, amongst other add-ons.

Whether you decide for VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting, the selection between managed and unmanaged hosting is crucial. Before you compromise on a managed plan or an unmanaged plan, consider your:

• Technical skills.
• Time.
• Budget.
• Business goals. 

Generally, unmanaged hosting plans leave server management, performance optimization, and monitoring as much as you. If you’ve gotten strong technical skills, a dedicated IT team, and the boldness to administer your personal VPS or dedicated server, then unmanaged hosting could do the trick. 

But in case you don’t have an in-house staff with strong technical skills, unmanaged hosting can mean you miss out on many advantages of dedicated or VPS hosting. Likewise, in case your IT team is used to shared hosting and also you level as much as an unmanaged dedicated server cluster, there might be a steep learning curve before all the pieces runs easily.

Even for seasoned WordPress or Magento pros, managing your personal server operations is not any walk within the park. In-house server management will not be one of the best use of your staff’s time. 

For budget-conscious business owners or bloggers, unmanaged hosting is undoubtedly a pretty option on the surface. That said, as your hosting needs develop into more complex, the extra time spent specializing in your hosting setup could outweigh the financial advantages of unmanaged hosting. And for enterprise-level businesses, managed hosting plans bring savings that may offset costs.

In the event you’ve already decided to increase your budget to dedicated or VPS hosting, going for a managed hosting plan could make financial sense in the long run. For instance, along with reducing demands in your IT staff, managed hosts like Liquid Web often have key perks you won’t find with unmanaged offerings, similar to premium migration assistance and around-the-clock support. 

Because unmanaged hosting is a no-frills option, you can find that as your corporation grows, you find yourself needing to pay more for extras to make sure your website’s performance doesn’t slip. This should not be a problem if you’ve gotten an easy blog with little traffic.

Nonetheless, in case you run a successful ecommerce company or need to establish latest web sites and apps steadily, your hosting plan needs to maintain up. With a managed plan from a respected host like Liquid Web, you’ll get scalability as a regular.

When it seems like you’ve outgrown that shared hosting plan, a VPS might seem to be the subsequent logical selection. Here’s the way it sizes up when comparing VPS hosting vs shared hosting:    

• Price — Overall, VPS is cheaper than dedicated hosting with most service providers. A VPS may be a great alternative in case your budget can’t stretch to a dedicated server plan.  
• Customization and control — VPS is more customizable than shared hosting. For instance, many hosts offer you root access for heightened control, and you possibly can generally select your server’s operating system, similar to Linux or Windows.
• Variety — VPS hosting plans offer many options for various price points and resource requirements similar to disk space and memory.
• Scalability — VPS hosting is mostly highly scalable, which is sweet for growing businesses and people needing to scale down during quiet periods. If you’ve gotten a dedicated server, you possibly can’t make the server you rent smaller or greater.  
• Speed — VPS plans offer vastly higher performance than shared hosting. With strict resource allocation, greedy server neighbors can’t throttle your website’s speed. 

• Control — You don’t have full control over your server setup, especially by way of hardware configuration. 
• Security — While the virtualization layer gives you fairly robust protection compared with shared hosting, you’re still sharing the identical physical hardware as other web sites. 
• Skills — Face to face, a VPS requires more technical know-how than shared hosting. That said, in case you select a managed hosting provider like Liquid Web, you’ll get full server management and access to high-level support from hosting experts. 

In your comparison of dedicated server vs VPS hosting options, it’s necessary to watch out of the small print as we explore the benefits and drawbacks of this server type.  

• Performance — As you’d expect, a server whose only purpose is to host your website does a stand-up job at optimizing speed. At Nexess, your dedicated server has custom architecture, and the Enterprise Support Group can assist with optimization for top performance.  
• Control and customization — Since you’re the only real occupant of a dedicated server, you possibly can paint the rooms whichever color you want. Liquid Web provides highly customizable software and hardware options for beginners and premiere customers, similar to bare metal servers and headless nodes.  
• Reliability — Dedicated servers often have built-in redundancy to guard uptime. At Liquid Web, data redundancy is ensured, and customers have a 100% network uptime guarantee. 
• Security — With managed dedicated hosting, you don’t must worry about security breaches from other web sites in your hosting server.  

• Relatively expensive — Dedicated hosting has a better initial price point. That said, for a lot of high-growth businesses, it returns an abundance of advantages to offset costs. 
• Lead time — A dedicated server may require an extended setup time due to level of customization involved. 
• Flexibility and suitability — While the resources of dedicated servers could be scaled through clustering, you possibly can’t really scale down a dedicated server. Also, a dedicated server is simply essential for high-traffic, resource-intense web sites. All that computing power will not be needed for a comparatively easy blog. 

Whether it’s best to purchase a plan with managed VPS or a dedicated single server for your corporation relies on your specific needs. 

To make it easier to resolve between these two attractive options, consider the next:

• Your website’s setup.
• Budget.
• Level of experience.
• Business growth potential.
• Support requirements.

Some website configurations will suit dedicated servers higher. For instance, blog owners often have vastly different must ecommerce store operators, so it’s no surprise that their server needs differ too. 

In the event you own a preferred WordPress blog or group of internet sites, it’s best to select a dedicated server that’s optimized for WordPress. In the event you operate an ecommerce website, you could desire a server optimized for WooCommerce or Magento.

For complex web sites with customized web apps, you’ll have more control to optimize their performance in case you use a dedicated server. 

Also, in case you operate an internet site with sensitive customer data, a dedicated server may be one of the best option for safeguarding it against security threats.    

While dedicated hosting could also be a top selection for resource-hungry web sites, it won’t fit into every website owner’s hosting budget. But in case you can shoulder the initial cost, a dedicated server plan could serve you well in the long term. 

Generally, the more advanced your server option, the upper the expertise needed to reap the advantages. If your organization employs a team to optimize your hosting setup, then a dedicated server might be your best option. 

You too can overcome many expertise barriers by choosing fully managed hosting.

Usually, a VPS offers loads of scalability for web sites with moderate traffic levels. But while a dedicated server may not seem as easily scalable, it offers the very best growth potential for web sites expecting substantial resource needs. 

Suppose your organization outgrows a single dedicated server. In that case, you should utilize a server cluster to maximise your website’s performance and proceed adding servers to the cluster as needed to satisfy future growth. 

In the event you consistently depend on top-tier support to your managed shared hosting plan, you could not stand to profit much from an unmanaged VPS plan with weaker support. 

For instance, in case your VPS isn’t functioning as expected and there’s a protracted wait for support, a VPS might seem to be a downgrade as problems cascade throughout the wait for support.  Select a managed web host with always-on, tier-free support like Liquid Web to make sure your website stays in good condition.   

Selecting one of the best server plan to your company’s online presence relies on your specific needs. When comparing VPS vs dedicated server hosting, your needs should all the time be front and center.

Liquid Web understands that clients have different hosting needs. That’s why managed hosting plans offer unparalleled customizability, scalability, robust compliance, proactive monitoring, and 24/7/365 expert support. 

And in case you aren’t quite able to scale as much as a dedicated server, you possibly can still leverage high performance with a VPS Hosting plan.
To learn more about our managed hosting options, contact us today.