Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

January 18, 2012

Top Alternatives to Shared Web Hosting

In a previous post, we devled deeply into the chinks in shared hostings armor. We included reasons, but to be fair, we mostly complained without offering specific solutions. As such, we feel we owe those among you who desire a quality, low-priced, and efficient way to host your website a few choice venues, venues that do not in any way include room for shared hosting. Such avenues do exist, and if you’ll kindly read on below the break, we’ll dive into a few of the top alternatives to shared web hosting, as well as a bit about how each works. Starting with:

1.  The Dedicated Server

If you know much about dedicated servers, we have a feeling you’re cringing in your seat, feeling a sharp pain in the pit of your wallet. To be fair, it’s not an uncommon reaction: Dedicated servers are typically pricier than most other hosting methods, and with good reason. When you’re paying for a unique, dedicated bit of hardware to manage your entire Web presence and identity, with the utmost in control and responsiveness, it’s likely going to cost you a pretty penny. For the uninitiated among you, though, simply saying that may not be enough. As such, here’s a fairly accurate—if somewhat fanciful—metaphor to explain how a dedicated server works, as well as how it can blow shared hosting out of the water any day.

In our previous post, we described shared web hosting as a very large house in which potentially thousands of residents live together, each in their own separate room. Each of these rooms represents a unique server space dedicated entirely to that user’s data, while the house itself is, of course, the server. Because of the limitations of this arrangement, users will very quickly begin rubbing elbows, competing for house resources, potentially damaging others’ property, and generally finding boundaries and boundaries a plenty.

If dedicated hosting were stretched across the same metaphor, it would be like ditching the individual room to instead own the whole house. Hiring a dedicated server grants you unrestricted access to every room in the whole mansion, without any other users, save those you invite in. As such, you’re given an unbelievable amount of power and performance, as well as completely unmitigated resources. You’re the boss, and with no one else around to tell you otherwise, the place is yours to do what you want with.

Obviously, though, owning the whole house—or server—will cost a fair bit more than simply sharing it with thousands of other people. Dedicated servers are pricy, but if you need unparalleled performance on the Web, there is no other option.

2.  Virtual Private Servers

So what if you aren’t quite ready to bite the bullet on a full-on dedicated server? What if you’d like similar performance and control, but only at half the cost, or potentially even less? If so, acquiring a virtual private server is your best bet. The technology allows users to experience their website and server access as if they owned the whole hardware, when in fact, they still share it with a handful of other users. Each individual virtualization is given its own amount of resources that cannot be taken away, nor can any other part of the server crash another virtualization. It’s a nearly full-proof method, and if you’re looking for truly middle of the road performance with a middle-ground price tag, it’s a solid option. Again, let’s return to the house metaphor to explain how this works.

If the house is still the sever, let’s imagine you live in the house with only about five or six people. Rather than sectioning off individual rooms, however, the people in the home have decided to erect walls, carve out doors, and add new structures so that the house appears to be a total of five or six other houses on the inside. Each mini-house comes with its own, un-shared space, as well as its own resources: Food, water, furniture, etc.

In much the same way, a virtualization creates an image of a real server on the server itself. This image acts as if its a freestanding unit, though in all actuality, it’s simply a partition on the larger server. Several of these can exist in tandem, but as they’re partitioned from each other, there’s no hope of interaction: This is a good thing, as each partition comes with its own available disc space, RAM, and performance, all of which can not be altered by changes elsewhere on the server. It’s a brilliant system, and if you’re not quite feeling up to owning the whole house, perhaps fashioning your own functional copy will do instead!

3.  Cloud Hosting

Lastly, we have cloud hosting. This one is tricker to explain, so we’ll start with the metaphor and then work backwards from there.

Instead of having a house, let’s assume you instead have a closet at a friend’s house. Then multiply this by a thousand, meaning you now own a thousand closets at a thousand other friends’ houses, each of which is available for you to save copies of your items in. Should you need that item, you simply go to the nearest friend’s closet, and retrieve it. This is, in an abstract fashion, cloud hosting.

Cloud hosting takes your data, copies it, and then places it on potentially thousands of other computers and servers around the world. In essence, your data is being shared with even more users than in traditional shared hosting, but with benefits. Because your data can be found at thousands of unique points, when it is needed, it can be delivered from thousands of locations. There’s no server drain, no load, and no need to worry about other users hogging your bandwidth. If your site experiences peak hours, simply more connections are opened, and your content is delivered with an increased performance. It’s that simple, and it’s relatively cheap, too: Making shared hosting look absolutely foolish in a modern age where peer-to-peer connections can power the Internet.

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