It is a very common question whirling around in the web developers’ mind. Prior to any website launch, every web designer looks up to numerous hosting reviews and takes expert advice for a perfect hosting plan that may fulfill all their site requirements. Let’s primarily go through the three basic web hosting plans in brief:
1. VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and the name itself indicates you may think that the web services offer a private server for a particular site. Well, hold on, your guess is incorrect! The site is hosted on a shared server except that there is more disk space, bandwidth and provision for hosting multiple websites using separate cPanel accounts.
2. Dedicated Server Hosting
The entire server hosts a single website in this type of plan.
All the services provided are remarkable: complete administrative control over server (inclusive of OS and hardware) with maximum customization. The sites hosted on this server have an overall excellent performance in terms of uptime, response time and traffic support as it does not share resources with other sites to get influenced and affected. Hence, the sites with high-commercial targets and heavy traffic choose the dedicated server hosting plan.
3. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting plan is very simple to understand. The websites hosted here share the server space with that of the other and so are the resources (CPU, Storage Space and RAM) shared. However, note that, the sharing results in compromise in site performance. If the site’s traffic, space or bandwidth crosses the limits set by shared hosting plan, then it needs to upgrade to the VPS hosting or dedicated hosting plan as per the requirement.
Besides knowing the details of each plan, the matter we are worried about is how much efficiently suitable is shared hosting for our website! Is the shared hosting a right choice to be made with fair enough justification to our site demands?
The very basic and logically comprehensible concept is about understanding the amount of server load put by our webpages. Based on this, we can comment on the space shared by a single server for multiple sites hosted on it and consequently its quality of performance.
A simple formula can best explain what exactly I want to convey:
Less multimedia rich content => Less load on server => Better server performance => More traffic support.
The above statement says if there is less multimedia content such as HD images, audio, video, etc on your web pages, then it has fewer load on its host server. Again, if there is fewer load on server, then it enhances the efficiency of server performance i.e. the uptime time and response time is well maintained and presented at least possible time. Furthermore, a quality performance by server results in handling of more and more traffic.
Now, the problem is that many webmasters in pretext of getting a cheaper plan go with the shared hosting option. Had they knew little that not all sites can successfully run on shared server due to the aforementioned factors, they would have taken a prudent decision for their web hosting. The server performance indirectly depends on the site content it hosts. The general shared hosting plans cannot handle more than about 20,000 visits/day; else there is compromise in site performance which might disappoint the visitors. In this case, the web host company will advise you to pay some bucks and upgrade to the Dedicated Hosting Plan.
The conclusion has it that shared hosting is best suitable for the small-scale commercial sites or even personal blogs and definitely a bad choice for sites with heavy content and traffic. Don’t go for it just because the packages are cheap; choose the worth for your site as right investment gives rightful profit! After all, compromising quality of your work is equivalent to compromising your dreams.