Is a VPS More Complicated Than Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting has the limitation that your resources aren’t dedicated to you alone. You’re always “sharing” them with someone else. So when you see “X GB” RAM on a shared hosting specifications page, it’s understood that you won’t be getting all of that for yourself. Providers have to juggle resources to constantly ensure that each site is getting a fair chunk. If you want to finally be free of sharing resources with others, the next step is to get a Virtual Private Server or a VPS.

But there’s no question that managing a VPS is a bit more complicated than just logging into shared hosting and installing your application. In fact, it can be a lot more complicated, depending on how deep into the weeds you want to get. You can get by with just an initial set up and then not have to think too much about VPS management, or you can micro-manage the entire system everyday and create ever more intricate rules for your VPS to follow. The choice is yours.

What Does a VPS Involve Compared to Shared Hosting?

With shared hosting, you’re probably familiar with a dashboard interface like cPanel where you can install applications, configure Cloudflare, check error logs or your websites, and more. Some providers have their own custom interface instead of cPanel, so you might be more familiar with those instead.

With a NameHero VPS, you still have the same cPanel interface, so you’ll be on familiar territory there. However, you’ll also have an additional login interface to manage the server itself.

The Web Host Manager

The Web Host Manager or WHM is an interface that allows you to manage the server itself. By default, a NameHero VPS comes with a WHM license, which makes it easy for you to get started. It’s quite intuitive once you know what you have to do. But a first time user definitely needs some hand holding, because you don’t know what to do!

Registering your Nameservers

This is the first major difference between shared hosting and a VPS. On shared hosting, you don’t really need to worry about DNS if you’re letting all the configuration happen automatically. On a VPS, you need to assign IP addresses to your Nameservers in the Web Hosting Manager (WHM). You can see how to do that in our tutorial here.

So right off the bat, you can see that a VPS involves different steps compared to shared hosting.

Assigning Websites

When you first purchase a VPS on NameHero, after the initial set up process of registering your nameservers, you’ll want to add your websites to it. Once again, this is something you don’t have to do on shared hosting, since you enter your domain name at the same time that you sign up. Of course, you can always add another website later on if your hosting package allows it on shared hosting.

You can read our tutorial on how to add new websites to your VPS. Once again, it requires you to log into the WHM interface.

So a Little More Complexity, But Not Much

Bottom line – as of now, yes. A VPS will require more management on your end. But these can be restricted to initial set up configurations, and ones that are fairly straightforward. Hopefully the videos linked to above will get you started.

Once you’re done with that, you can simply log into cPanel as you did before with shared hosting. The NameHero team automatically takes care of server updates, and your new websites have SSH in-built into them, so you don’t need to worry about any of that.

So if you’re thinking of getting a VPS, don’t be shy about trying it out. You’ll get dedicated resources without anyone else to much up your performance, at the cost of a little initial set up time!