Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

February 09, 2011

Ideal Hosting Plan for Novices – VPS vs. Shared Hosting

Beginning your career as a webmaster and venturing into the world of online business endeavors can be an intimidating process, especially without any experience or expertise in web hosting. Without the proper web hosting plan, your websites will be unable to achieve optimal performance; pages will load slowly when traffic levels are high, and there is a higher chance of having site or server downtime, during which time your site is completely unavailable. There are three main aspects of a web hosting plan that should be considered by the aspiring webmaster – set up costs and monthly expenses, plan limits and capabilities, and overall reliability - all three of which are briefly outlined and compared for each plan type below.

The True Set Up Costs of VPS and Shared Web Hosting

Unfortunately, the majority of novice webmasters simply choose what seems to be the cheapest web hosting plan available to them, and then proceed without any further thought. However, although the monthly cost of shared web hosting may be less than VPS hosting, many people don't realize that the amount of money required up front is actually more. This is because the majority of shared web hosting providers require you to pay for at least one year in advance, which even at the lowest price of about five dollars per month amounts to a total of $60 plus setup fees.

On the other hand, although VPS hosting plans are typically a bit more expensive in terms of monthly expenses (being $10-$20 per month at the cheapest) most VPS providers allow you to pay for your hosting plan on a monthly basis, making the start up cost equal to the monthly expense. Thus,  webmasters on a budget or those that are uncertain of their investment capabilities, skill level, and the expected duration of their online endeavors, may want to consider purchasing a cheap monthly VPS hosting plan instead of one year of shared hosting.

Plan Limits and Capabilities

Aside from having cheaper set up costs than shared web hosting, VPS hosting is also much more capable of accommodating high levels of web traffic and larger site content networks. Unlike shared hosting, a VPS hosting plan gives you access to a virtual private server, which is basically a partition or section of the server that is specifically devoted to the needs of your websites and web applications. On the other hand, shared hosting plans require you to share the resources of a single Web server with dozens or even hundreds of other websites and webmasters simultaneously. VPS hosting is one of the most diverse hosting types, providing plans that range in cost from $10-$200, depending on the capabilities of the server partition.

Overall Reliability and Stability

Since VPS hosting plans are more privatized, giving you exclusive access to a personalized server partition, you can be sure that your web hosting services are far more reliable than those offered with a standard shared hosting plan. Shared web hosting undoubtedly experiences the largest amount of server downtime, security lapses, hardware failures, and general mishaps in the web hosting industry. It is important to note that the reliability of VPS hosting plan will vary depending on how large the server partition for that particular plan is.

Tags: Shared Hosting,  VPS hosting,  shared server,  virtual private servers