As human civilization has been a new level of reality for the primordial natural world, the world wide web seems to be an “add-on” of not lesser significance to our human civilization.
Whether you know it or not, but all this incredible network of the most diverse things that can be found on the web is made possible by very “material” solutions, that can be generally referred to as hosting, that is physical machines – servers – that run around the clock and are interconnected by a global network of optical fiber cables that make anything, once launched on a server, accessible to every internet user around the globe.
Usually, servers are rather leased from a specialized hosting provider than maintained in-house, which opens the door to a whole bunch of hosting services.
If you are about to launch your own website or any other kind of web project but are new to this area, then clarifying the basic concepts used in hosting will be much helpful for you to choose the optimal option.
Two of these are VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting, which are two fundamental hosting services. The features of both we’ll be covering in the following.
Dedicated Server
Dedicated server hosting is a hosting service that is made possible by renting a whole piece of physical hardware that is housed in a data center. Opting for a dedicated server means opting for the best performance available. However, high-quality service comes also with a higher price.
As previously mentioned, dedicated servers are not shared with other customers, so the resources are available to your website or application around the clock. This necessarily leads to you enjoying the highest level of performance available, with a high level of security, stability, and reliability, faster loading times with minimum downtimes, and generally a huge amount of resources to realize projects of literally any scale.
However, the flip side of the coin is the cost that you have to pay for a dedicated server combined with the fact that not all websites are so resources consuming that would require a separate physical server with that much storage, RAM, and CPU computing power.
Nevertheless, to solve the problem of many clients being unable to afford and not actually needing the capacity of dedicated hosting, an alternative solution has been developed – a virtual private server or VPS.
VPS hosting
VPS hosting is a hosting solution that is based on sharing the resource of one physical parental server with numerous customers. VPS hosting, however, shouldn’t be confused with shared hosting, which is a whole other thing.
When resources are shared within shared hosting, there is no strict allocation of them; on the contrary, they are shared on per use basis. That means that there are no limits for each user.
This can pretty often result in unstable performance due to excessive resource consumption by one or a few users within certain rather unpredictable periods.
VPS hosting, that is to say, solves both the problem of dedicated hosting and of shared hosting.
VPS has been made possible by virtualization technology – a technology that allows cutting the capacities of a single physical machine into even segments that work independently from each other, not interfering with each other’s performance.
This results in users being provided with a stable, reliable, secure, and powerful virtual machine, that gives them as many resources as they need, with flexible rescaling options and for a lower price tag.
The general experience of using a VPS is for the most part similar to the experience of a dedicated server, with little to no noticeable performance flaws, being affordable to a significantly broader circle of users.
Who Is Suitable For Dedicated Server Hosting And Who Is Suitable For VPS Hosting?
There is no definite answer to this question, as everything depends on the technical requirements of each particular project.
Generally, either solution is better than shared hosting, unless you are not dealing with a tiny blog for personal use. If you are running an ambitious commercial project, then an appropriate hosting solution is a must. The scale of it is what determines the service of your choice.
To make the right choice, you have to necessarily make some calculations of the requirements of the future website: how much traffic it’s expected to have every month, what kind of applications it is going to run, and how much data is involved in its operation.
Personal blogs, landing pages, small e-commerce websites, and similar never require the capacities of dedicated hosting.
On the other hand, big e-commerce websites and services that involve heavy applications, process a lot of data, use terabytes of storage, etc., will be likely to need an entire dedicated server.
If your project isn’t going to be massive at the moment but is likely to grow, VPS is a reasonable choice, as it allows you to rescale more easily. Eventually, you’ll be able to switch to dedicated hosting once your requirements start to exceed the best VPS plans.
Now, we hope that the concepts of dedicated hosting and VPS hosting have become fully clear to you and you have a more or less clear idea of what will be the most suitable option in your case. Here we conclude our material, thank you for your attention!
