Shared hosting offers an affordable starting point for small websites, while VPS provides more power for growing businesses with up to 20,000 daily visitors. Dedicated hosting delivers maximum performance and security for high-traffic sites handling sensitive data. Choose based on your current needs and anticipated growth to create a strong foundation for your online success.
Shared vs VPS vs Dedicated Hosting, which do you choose? With all the different types of web hosting available, it can be confusing as to which one is right for you. You may just be wondering what a VPS or Shared Hosting is.
In this guide, we will explain what Shared, VPS, & Dedicated hosting plans are and list the differences between them so you can determine which web hosting plan is right for you.
Different hosting plans for different needs
The type of hosting plan you choose will depend on the size and needs of your business. Depending on your role, you will have different considerations, too.
Small business owners
Small businesses have a limited number of employees or amount of revenue. These can include businesses operated by one person or that employ hundreds of people. It can be difficult to define exactly what a small business is, but generally speaking, it is a business that employs fewer than 500 people. For small business owners, cost-efficiency is a key factor in choosing a hosting plan. They should choose a plan that fits comfortably within their budget but still makes it easy to scale in the future.
Small business owners know what’s best for their clients, but they may not always know all the technical aspects and implications of web hosting. Therefore, they should also choose a plan that offers robust customer support services, so their questions can be quickly addressed and resolved.
Enterprise CTO
Enterprise CTOs (Chief Technology Officers) are responsible for ensuring the technological needs of a company are met. They are highly skilled individuals with in-depth experience in the technological aspects of the business.
CTOs will be more likely to shop around to find the perfect hosting plan for their organization. They may not require as much customer support as small business owners, but they will have high expectations for the performance of the hosting plan they choose. Their key considerations will be uptime, reliability, scalability, security, and flexibility, based on their organization’s specific needs.
Developers
Developers are among the employees most aware of a company’s technological needs. They work with it directly daily, improving, developing, and maintaining the business technology assets, including the website.
Similarly to CTOs, developers should value reliability, the ability to scale easily, security, and customization options. Although they also have in-depth knowledge of information technology, they may look for a web hosting plan with robust customer service, in case the need for support in their daily work arises.
The three web hosting plan types at a glance
Hosting Platform Analogies
Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting is very similar to living in an apartment complex. All residents are in the same location and must share the available resources with everyone, including the pool, parking lot, and playground. In shared hosting, all accounts must share the available resources with all the other accounts on the server. These include CPU time, memory, and disk space. Our System Administrators monitor all of our shared servers 24/7.
Pros of shared hosting
Limited resource allocation: The host manages all the software and hardware requirements of hosting.
Cost efficiency: Shared hosting is the most budget-friendly option, freeing up financial resources for other business needs.
Cons of shared hosting
Limited customization options: It is more difficult to tailor the hosting plan exactly to your business needs, especially if your business is evolving or scaling quickly.
Scalability and reliability: If your website suddenly experiences large spikes in traffic, shared hosting may not be as reliable as VPS or dedicated hosting.
Managed VPS Hosting
Managed VPS Hosting is similar to owning a condo. While you still share things on the property, you are ultimately responsible for maintaining your property and repairs inside the condo. There are also significantly fewer residents per building.
Not all resources are shared on a Virtual Private Server (VPS). The overall CPU time and memory are shared across all accounts on the machine, but at the same time, portions of those resources are always dedicated to each account. This allows for more power and flexibility than being on a shared account.
Pros of VPS hosting
Cost efficiency: Although VPS hosting isn’t the cheapest option, it is still far cheaper than dedicated hosting. It should be affordable for most small to medium-sized businesses.
More customization options and performance capacity: VPS hosting offers more opportunities to tailor the hosting plan to your business needs, and can handle unexpected spikes in traffic more effectively than shared hosting plans.
Cons of VPS hosting
Greater resource allocation: A VPS requires more resources and processing power than shared hosting. This includes the need for more CPU, RAM, and technical talent.
Shared resources: Unlike dedicated hosting, VPS hosting shares a server with other websites. This limits customization options and scalability (the business may need to shift to a dedicated server when it experiences significant growth).
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting can be compared to owning a house. You have access to all the resources available on the machine, and no one else’s account resides on the machine (or, in the case of our analogy, your house).
Pros of dedicated hosting
Performance: Dedicated hosting offers the best performance across the board, including scalability, customization, and uptime.
Security: Dedicated hosting offers higher levels of security for your website. The overall risks associated with a data breach are lower.
Cons of dedicated hosting
Cost: As the most expensive hosting plan option, dedicated hosting is suited to businesses with a higher profit turnover. It may not be an affordable option for small or medium-sized businesses (depending on the dedicated hosting plan chosen).
Resource allocation: The organization is fully responsible for the server resources and hiring the right technical talent to monitor and maintain them.
Real-World Decision Framework
Now that you know the pros and cons of the different hosting types, the next step is to choose one. Here are the factors to consider when choosing a hosting type:
For sites getting 10,000 to 20,000 daily visitors, VPS hosting is ideal.
For sites that exceed 20,000, consider upgrading to dedicated hosting.
Industry-specific requirementseCommerce platforms, featuring hundreds or even thousands of product pages with carts, payments, and billing features, will have vastly different needs than high-traffic information websites.
A VPS or dedicated hosting plan is best if your business requires robust security to protect customer and payment data.
Site content or featuresFor organizations needing advanced website customization, such as user-specific access to features and content, VPS or dedicated hosting is ideal.
Some websites have higher workloads due to these factors and need more processing power to support them.
ScalabilityWhether your hosting service can grow with you is a key factor. A small, localized business with a consistent customer base may not see the need to scale. But competitive eCommerce businesses will be thinking more long-term.
For businesses that expect significant growth quickly (for example, due to investment or product scalability), starting with a VPS or dedicated hosting plan is advisable.
Map out your business’s expected growth in the next 3-5 years. Ensure the hosting plan you choose will be able to grow with it.
Migration considerationsYou should consider how easy it will be to migrate your website as the needs of your business change. Choose a hosting plan with straightforward migration and robust customer support if you need assistance.
Shared Web Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting
There are a number of factors that impact the cost and value of Dedicated Hosting in comparison to Shared Hosting. Below are just a few examples of how Dedicated Servers differ from Shared Servers.
Server Performance
One of the potential downsides of shared hosting is that the server shares resources across all users housed within it. This can sometimes lead to a “noisy neighbors” situation where your hosting experience is diminished by the resource-intensive actions of other users on the same server.
By contrast, a dedicated server will have faster response times and greater reliability as it is not impacted by the operations of other users on the server. This is due to having a dedicated server with resources that are only available to you.
For example, InMotion’s most affordable Dedicated Server includes a 3.50GHz Turbo Xeon processor, 16GB of DDR3 RAM, 1TB SSD, and 8MB of CPU Cache for each account. This means you would only be affected by your sole resource usage instead of other people you are “sharing” server space with.
Customization
A shared hosting service must limit the software installed by multiple users. If not, something malicious could be uploaded that could impact your server’s security. Broken scripts can cause every site on the server to go down. On the plus side, less customization means a much easier learning curve.
A dedicated server gives you more room to customize. You can install optimized software that meets your company and customer requirements without worrying about restrictions or impacting another company’s websites.
With root user access, you have unlimited permission to modify any aspect of the server you want. You can make custom modifications specific to the needs of your website or applications.
Server Security
If someone else on your shared server suffers from a hack, your server and all sites on it can suffer performance degradation. In addition, your site’s security could become compromised, particularly if you allow financial transactions on your site or store private customer information.
On a dedicated server, you do not have to worry about other users compromising the entire server. Additionally, you can increase your security by installing hardware and software firewalls as well as powerful security tools that require root-level access not available on shared hosting platforms.
For example, on a dedicated server, you can modify port settings, make custom firewall rules, or configure DNSSEC, just to name a few.
VPS Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting
While there are many subtle differences between VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting, here are a few examples of how they differ.
Speed
While users on VPS platforms are partitioned into discrete virtual environments, they all still share the same physical hardware and can only access a fraction of the total system resources.
In dedicated hosting, all system resources are available to the user by default. Having access to these resources improves page load times and increases website responsiveness. It is important to remember that the faster a page loads, the more likely a visitor will stay on your site.
Price
Generally speaking, VPS hosting is going to cost much less than any dedicated plan. The reduced cost is due to the shared nature of VPS hosting. This is important to keep in mind when considering your web hosting budget.
Dedicated hosting, by contrast, can be quite expensive due to hardware costs and data center operations. For this reason, dedicated servers are best suited for large-scale applications such as eCommerce businesses.
Scalability
When it comes to expanding your site or increasing the amount of storage you need, a VPS is often the superior solution. Since VPS platforms are managed virtually, upgrading your storage can be done by allocating additional resources from the existing pool of memory.
With dedicated hosting, you will need to physically add additional drives to the server. This costs money and time and can cause downtime on your site as the hardware is installed.
Still not sure if Dedicated Hosting is right for you? Learn more about the uses of dedicated hosting, the importance of data center location, and aspects to consider when looking to upgrade to dedicated hosting.
Overall, InMotion Hosting is willing to work with you if you are aware of sudden increases in bandwidth that may exceed your shared or VPS accounts. We can temporarily work with you to increase your account so that you can handle a large influx of traffic.
This is also important when dealing with a loss in business. If you need to move down to a lower server, the account can be reviewed and moved to a VPS or Shared account to reduce your costs while still covering your current bandwidth needs.
Developer Tools and Features
When testing new features of your website, in the event of migrations, and other situations in which you will need to conduct tests, reliable staging environments are key. They allow you to experience it as a website visitor before it’s live, ensuring a smooth transition. Version control, which allows you to keep track of code changes, is also a key factor. It allows you to revert to previous versions of your website if needed, and its integration should be reliable and easy. Other features your website developers will appreciate include redundancy solutions, custom port mapping, and application optimizations.
Security
Hosting companies do not advertise their security as it would be the same as placing a target on your back. However, shared servers, VPS, and Dedicated server hosting all have different measures of security. Security also involves backups and recovery, and InMotion Hosting does provide these services through the hosting software or a paid service for VPS and shared server accounts. Dedicated Server accounts using cPanel can offer Backup Manager along with larger storage spaces due to their configuration and cost.
Managed plans for all three types of hosting are available and allow users to employ InMotion Hosting support to manage the hardware systems they are subscribing to. Additionally, there are unmanaged solutions that give others the complete control they may want when obtaining server access.
Email Hosting Capabilities
If your business receives a lot of emails, it’s important to consider whether your hosting plan will be able to handle it. Consider the capabilities of each hosting type below:
When to Choose Each Hosting Type
Shared hosting
Enterprise CTO
A CTO will choose a shared hosting plan for their low-traffic website, which doesn’t require specific needs or customizations. For example, a B2B (business-to-business) product or service catering to small, local businesses.
Small business owner
A small business owner will opt for shared hosting as a cost-effective solution for their website needs. They need to choose a plan that will allow them to scale easily if needed. For example, an eCommerce business selling niche products or services to a targeted, localized market.
Developer
Like the CTO, developers will consider the traffic count, business-specific needs, and customization options of shared hosting. They will deem shared hosting sufficient if their site numbers do not exceed a few thousand per day and if it covers all of their basic needs. For example, a website selling courses with a limited number of participants.
VPS Hosting
Enterprise CTO
Enterprise CTOs will choose VPS hosting when their organization requires more processing power and customization options. This may be either an upgrade from shared hosting as a result of business growth, or as a first option. For example, the expansion of a tourism business into new markets, which will mean a significant uptick in website visitors, transactions, and business communications (such as emails).
Small business owner
Depending on the type of product or service, some small business owners will decide that VPS hosting is a better option than shared hosting. Although small businesses may have fewer transactions and website visitors overall, their products or services may be very reliant on technology, customization, and high amounts of processing power. For example, a gig economy technology business that targets users globally and can grow very quickly.
Developer
As the team members who work with the website’s backend on a day-to-day basis, developers will be hyper-aware of how well the website is handling all of its requests. An upgrade to VPS hosting from shared hosting will be warranted if load times are too slow, the website crashes, or certain features don’t work as effectively as they used to. New technology-based products or services (such as a B2B version of their existing B2C – business-to-customer – product) will also be a reason to upgrade to VPS hosting.
Dedicated hosting
Enterprise CTO
Enterprise CTOs will choose dedicated hosting when their business needs the highest amount of processing power, the most customization options, and the highest level of security possible. For example, a multinational corporation with millions of users worldwide.
Small business owner
Small business owners will opt for dedicated hosting when their products or services cannot be catered for by shared or VPS hosting. They might provide high-end technology products for other businesses or be dealing with highly sensitive data. For example, data security organizations.
Developer
Similarly to the enterprise CTOs, developers will choose to upgrade to dedicated hosting from shared or VPS hosting when their organization needs greater security, optimal performance, and the most advanced customization options. New products or services, expansion into new markets, or data breach threats may all be reasons to move to a dedicated server. For example, a technology organization that wins a government tender and therefore needs to upgrade to the highest level of security.
Shared and Dedicated IP Addresses
An IP Address is the unique number tied to a website, computer, or another internet-connected device that allows it to receive and transmit data on the World Wide Web. A website or account with a shared IP address will use the same IP address as other accounts on a server, while an account with one or more dedicated IP addresses can have exclusive use of a particular IP address.
Shared IP addresses are a great choice for saving money. Using a dedicated IP address can make certain aspects of site management and email administration much easier. Generally, all of our Shared Hosting accounts use shared IP addresses, while VPS, Cloud, and Dedicated Hosting accounts all come with a certain number of dedicated IP addresses. If you’d like to add a dedicated IP address to a Shared Hosting account, or add more dedicated IP addresses to your VPS, Cloud, or Dedicated Hosting account, you can always purchase dedicated IP addresses within the Account Management Panel (AMP).
Long-Term Value Analysis of Hosting Types
One of the most important factors to consider when choosing your hosting plan is the longevity of its value. Those who opt for cheaper hosting plans (such as shared hosting plans) may find that they end up spending a lot more on unexpected costs when they discover that the plan doesn’t meet the needs of their growing business. This can include workarounds when customizations are not possible, costs related to downtime or site failures, security breaches, or eventual migration costs.
Try to determine the future needs of your business as well as its needs today. Factor in how the ever-evolving technological landscape may or may not affect your business, the size your business could potentially grow to in the next 3-5 years, and what kind of customer support or technical talent you will need down the line.InMotion Hosting caters to all business types, and its customer support team is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They can help you choose the right hosting plan for your business, starting your web hosting journey in the best way possible.