Launching a website for personal or business use is a great way to boost your online presence. However, choosing the right web hosting for your site isn’t an easy job to do. It involves thorough research and a lot of consideration.
There are plenty of companies, like Hostinger that can help you get started, offering affordable and powerful solutions, while others, like Cloudflare, can provide SSL certificates or CDN services, to further improve your site.
In this article, we’ll show you the differences between shared hosting, VPS hosting, and cloud hosting to help you choose the perfect hosting type for your site.
Types of Hosting
Three of the most popular hosting services are shared hosting, VPS hosting, and cloud hosting. Let’s learn what’s the difference between them.
Shared Hosting
When using a shared hosting service, your website will share one physical server with other websites. Meaning all sites on the server will use the same server’s storage, RAM, and CPU power.
Shared hosting is the most affordable hosting method available. The price range falls between $2 and $10. Most plans also pack freebies, like a free domain, domain-based email address, and SSL.
Aside from affordable prices, shared hosting is easy to set up. It usually comes with one-click installations, as your hosting provider will take care of any server maintenance.
On the weak side, shared hosting is less reliable because of limited resources. One popular site can monopolize the server’s resources, thus, affecting your site’s performance.
VPS Hosting
With VPS hosting, your website is still on the same physical server as the others. But, through virtualization technology, you get a dedicated partition with allocated server resources with the other sites hosted in the same server.
VPS is highly scalable. If the resources coming with the base plan don’t satisfy your needs, you can scale them up. On top of that, the virtualization technology ensures more stable site performance. So, you won’t have to worry about slow loading time.
VPS hosting also packs full root access. With this feature, you can install additional security software to enhance your site’s security. It also allows you to choose your preferred OS, with the restriction of Windows or Linux-based systems, depending on the server’s architecture.
A slight inconvenience of VPS hosting is that you need to have the technical knowledge to properly manage your VPS. But, you can sign up for managed VPS hosting to get your hosting provider to do all the technicalities.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is one of the most sophisticated web hosting models available. It uses cloud computing to create a virtual server comprised of multiple physical ones, split across multiple data centers. The many physical servers that make up the virtual server ensure high-stability performance.
While maximizing your site performance, the connected physical servers will back each other up if one happens to encounter issues. Therefore, cloud hosting is also the right hosting type to avoid downtime. On top of that, scaling up or down is also flexible with cloud hosting.
However, it’s tricky to configure cloud hosting’s security. When done right, your site can be the safest environment for your data. But, you risk losing it if you aren’t familiar with cloud server security.
Cloud hosting is also expensive. As scalability is very flexible, paying more than the resource you use is very likely to happen. Thus, you need to calculate your site’s needs meticulously to ensure cost-effectiveness.
Best Hosting For Personal Use
Personal websites, like online portfolios or resumes can easily stick to shared hosting. These kinds of sites don’t attract a considerable amount of traffic at the same time. Thus, the shared hosting environment is an ideal option to host these sites.
For a resume website, you can choose a single-page site layout to minimize your site’s load time. On the other hand, portfolio websites tend to have multiple pages and are more media-busy.
On average, a web page weighs 2 MB. In some cases, it can surge over 3 MB. Suppose your single-page resume site gets 500 visits per month. In this case, your site uses around 1 GB of bandwidth per month.
If we look at the average entry-level Shared Web Hosting plan comprising of 10 GB storage space, your resume site will run seamlessly. While 10 GB seems like a lot, you need to keep in mind that leaving some room for your site to grow is always recommended. Also, the more pages your site has, the more data your server should transfer.
Best Hosting For Bloggers
For new bloggers, shared hosting is also an excellent option to start with. As blogs tend to gain more traffic than resume or portfolio sites, you need to consider bandwidth and stability.
10 GB bandwidth can handle 4,000 visits. Meanwhile, a typical shared hosting plan recommends using it for about 10,000 visitors per month. Once your blog becomes popular, don’t worry. You can scale up to the higher tier.
Best Hosting For Small to Medium Businesses
The best way to kickstart a small or medium-sized business is by using VPS hosting. As it can comprise more stable performance and faster load time than shared hosting, online shoppers will love doing business with you.
An online business can expect about 20,000 page views per month. Thus, you need a 50 GB of bandwidth at minimum to handle the traffic. Having a stable and fast website is especially important for reducing bounce rate and improve lead generation.
Also, VPS’s enhanced security gives your prospective customers the confidence to make a business transaction with you.
Best Hosting For an Online Store
Cloud hosting offers the richest resources, ensuring excellent overall site performance. When using cloud hosting, you won’t have to worry about your site going down at peak time.
A big eCommerce website can receive as many as 5,000 page views each day. Meaning it needs 1.5 TB of bandwidth per month at least.
While a lot of VPS hosting plans can accommodate such traffic, it’s still a little unsafe because VPS only uses one physical server. Thus, lots of giant online retailers utilize cloud computing to minimize downtime.
Conclusion
Shared, VPS, and Cloud hostings are the three most popular hosting types. While they come with different advantages and disadvantages, each model is perfect for certain types of websites.
When choosing web hosting, always leave some room for your site to grow. Also, consider the degree of security your site needs. That way, you can boost your site performance, ensuring an excellent user experience.