VPS Hosting Vs Dedicated Server - How To Compare What You Get. (Mike Gates)
Jan 28, 2010
When most businesses first have a website developed for themselves, their web designer organizes web hosting for them on a shared server somewhere. During the years the website normally grows and gets more visitors. The company also learns that a shared hosting account has many limitations and sooner or later they often start investigating the possibility of upgrading to a VPS or a dedicated server. In this short discussion we will try to highlight some of the factors involved in a decision between VPS Hosting Vs Dedicated Server - How to Compare the pros and cons.
Since so many businesses use a shared hosting account when they get started, we will begin by explaining what exactly a shared hosting account is. What you get is basically a fixed amount of bandwidth (data transfer) per month and a certain amount of disk space. Your website shares everything on the main server with all the other websites.
The problem often comes when your hosting company overloads their shared server. They would sometimes allow more than a thousand websites on one server. If one of them suddenly gets a huge number of visitors, the server can't handle the load and all the websites go down.
As time goes by and you experience more and more of these outages, it is logical to start looking at a better option. The next step in the web hosting hierarchy is a VPS account ' a Virtual Private Server. You get a fixed amount of bandwidth, your fixed share of RAM and your fixed share of the CPU for your own use.
The major advantage of a VPS is that under most circumstances your website will be unaffected by what happens on the VPS next to you. You have your own RAM and CPU and what someone else does will not normally interfere with what you are doing.
Another advantage is that a VPS is much cheaper than a dedicated server. It will still cost you more than a shared hosting account, but depending on your disk space and bandwidth requirements you should not pay more than 20% of the cost of a dedicated server.
One of the limitations of a VPS is that it still shares the basic hardware of the main server with a few other VPS accounts. If a mechanical failure occurs somewhere on the main server all VPS accounts will stop to function.
A dedicated server solves most of these problems. You have full control over what happens to your website. You are allowed to upload any programs or scripts you want and what anybody else does will have no effect on you.
The single reason why many small companies select not to take this route is because running a dedicated server required the necessary technical know-how to manage a server. Many web servers make use of the Unix operating system and involves a programming language that is Greek to most business owners.
The managed dedicated server is the solution for these people. In this case the data center accepts full responsibility for the technical and software maintenance of the server. You only manages your own web data. This comes at a price though and is the most expensive solution.
In this short article we attempted to highlight the primary differences between VPS Hosting Vs Dedicated Server - How to Compare the features and how to make a choice based on facts.
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