March 19, 2024
Key Differences Between Shared, VPS and Cloud Hosting

Key Differences Between Shared, VPS and Cloud Hosting

Website hosting services have evolved a lot over the years. Starting from Dedicated Hosting in its initial days, it now offers a number of hosting options to site owners such as Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting and Cloud Hosting. Every one of these offers a different flavour of web hosting and has its own merits and uses in different scenarios.

Different site owners have different resource requirements. Some may want more storage space, while others may need more web applications. But all of them want fast web hosting. Linux web hosting is a category that encompasses all forms of hosting, including Shared, Cloud and VPS Hosting.

Shared Hosting is the most affordable among these three. But is it the right choice for your website?

Let’s see how Shared Web Hosting Service compares to the other two options.

Resource Allocation

In Shared Hosting, multiple websites reside on one physical server and share its resources such as storage, memory and CPU, among themselves. It allocates them on a first-come-first-serve basis.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) uses virtualisation to divide one physical server into multiple virtual servers. Websites do not have to share resources. Each site gets its own virtual server and resources.

Cloud Hosting harnesses multiple servers to host the website data. It has access to resources of multiple servers and guaranteed quick resource scalability.

Performance

Shared Hosting offers a steady performance for small and medium websites. If you choose Linux hosting with cPanel, you get a more consistent performance that’s almost on par with the other two hosting types.

VPS Hosting offers faster performance as websites do not have to rely on shared resources. It ensures that your website gets faster page load speeds and lower page load times.

With the resources of multiple servers at its disposal, Cloud Hosting is the fastest among the three. It reduces latency and serves user requests at faster speeds.

Security

Shared Hosting has proved to be a secure hosting platform over the years. But it is more at risk as multiple websites share the hosting space. An infection in one website could easily spread to others. However, if you choose a reliable hosting provider, they employ robust security practices, ensuring a safe hosting platform.

VPS Hosting offers a higher degree of protection as every website sits in its own secure virtual server. Even if other sites on the server get infected, your website will be safe.

Cloud Hosting ensures protection with a number of security tools that can be customised for better protection. Also, with data mirrored across multiple servers, Cloud Hosting offers high data redundancy.

Reliability

Shared Hosting is as reliable as your hosting provider. With the right web hosting provider that offers a high uptime guarantee, Shared Hosting is an extremely reliable hosting platform with low downtimes.

VPS Hosting offers some of the best uptimes in the world of hosting. By assigning a virtual server to every one of its websites, it ensures that issues in other sites do not affect yours.

Cloud Hosting is also known for its high reliability and almost zero downtimes. In case of an emergency, it can reroute additional resources in a quick time and ensure that the website stays up and running.

The following video further explains the difference between Cloud Hosting and Shared Hosting:

Now that you know all the crucial differences, you can make a well-informed decision for your site. If you have a dynamic website with huge resource requirements, then you should go with the slightly costlier VPS or Cloud Hosting services. However, if you have a basic website with minimal resource requirements, or if you have started a new website and are treading the waters, then start with the affordable and easy-to-manage Shared Hosting plans.