When choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website, hosting package types should be among the most important things to consider. The way hosting usually works is that the packages, at least in general, depend on the type of server your website will be hosted on. Servers are very important to your website. A difference, such as the difference between VPS and dedicated servers, may be larger than the pricing gap suggests.
So, when faced with the prospect of getting a new hosting plan, how will you know which one to choose? Neither VPS nor dedicated servers are entry-level options. Both offer many reasons to prefer them over the other party. Often, one of the options may be clearly better than the other, although it doesn’t need to be obvious to you.
That’s where we can help. In this article, we’ll clear things up and help you get into the dilemma with useful information. We will consider:
When you choose a hosting provider, you choose a company whose computer will act as a home or server for your website. A server comes with certain resources like any other computer. It has a CPU, some RAM, a disk for storage, and again the bandwidth to connect to the internet like any computer.
One of the things different hosting packages dictate is how many websites other than yours will share a single computer. This is important for several reasons, and the allocation of resources is the most obvious. If you need to share RAM, storage or bandwidth, your website may experience performance issues because of this.
These problems do not go unnoticed, as many websites use the least suitable hosting option and are successful. The larger the website and the more resources it needs, the more obvious it becomes that some hosting solutions are better than others. An entry-level hosting option, shared hosting allows your website to share the server and resources with other websites. Both VPS and dedicated are one step ahead, albeit in different ways and to a different extent.
“VPS” in “VPS hosting” stands for “virtual private server”. This means that if you choose this type of hosting for your website, it will be hosted on a virtual private server. “virtual” is the keyword here, as your website will actually share the server with other websites. It will still have some of the comforts of having a dedicated server, though.
With VPS hosting, each website on a server allocates its own stack of resources from the server. Shares are kept to a minimum and very carefully balanced so your website’s resource pool will never fall below what is guaranteed in your package. The hosting provider does this using an emulator, also known as a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor, which creates and maintains a virtual machine for each user on the server.
This type of hosting has the following advantages:
There are also a few minuses:
As a hosting option, VPS hosting is right in the middle between entry-level shared hosting and coveted dedicated hosting.
A dedicated server means exactly what it says – a single server and all resources dedicated to your website and your website alone. It’s like having a home all your own and you don’t have to share the bathroom, kitchen or any other comfort with others. You will know what resources the server has and they will only be allocated to your website.
Not sharing will not only give you access to all resources from a single server, but will also allow you to make some choices that you wouldn’t be able to make if your website had server friends. You can switch to a different CPU brand or a different operating system.
This is not the end of the list of pros that come with dedicated server hosting:
As for the cons:
Even the premium option has its cons, and the biggest win for regular users is its price. Should you still choose one? Let’s see which solution is more suitable for which situation.
While dedicated servers are clearly superior in performance and reliability, the real question to be answered is at what point will this superiority begin to manifest itself? Even something as simple as regular shared hosting can be a great fit for your WordPress website – a virtual private server can be a great choice for an even larger pool of websites. And your website can go on for years without making you think you might need an upgrade.
To be honest, in most cases a VPS is the better choice. If you have a small or medium business, a blog, or just want to build an online portfolio, you don’t need to look for dedicated hosting.
There are two points where looking for dedicated hosting is necessary. One is when your website demands grow more than you can manage with a VPS. If you have a really big website that gets a lot of traffic – VPS may not cut it anymore.
The other point that warrants the transition to dedicated hosting is whether you have very specific needs for hosting your website. If you need a particular type of hardware or software in your hosting setup, you’re much more likely to meet those needs with a dedicated server rather than a VPS.
Just remember that you will always have to balance the benefit with the cost of a dedicated server. Also, if you’re migrating from shared hosting, you should definitely consider going step-by-step instead of going straight to dedicated hosting – unless you really know what you’re doing and you definitely need dedicated hosting.
Let’s wrap it up!
When choosing the type of server you want to host your website on, you should do your best to choose one that suits your needs. If you choose an insufficient option, your website will have performance issues. If you choose an overpowering option, you will spend money for no reason.
The difference between VPS and dedicated server is that one is the cheaper and more powerful option, the other has greater power but comes at a higher cost. Ultimately, it will be up to you to make the choice – no one knows better your budget and your website needs.
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