What Is The Difference Between Shared Hosting And VPS Hosting?

I’ve previously compared Reseller Hosting to VPS Hosting here on the blog, but I have yet to address the difference between Shared Hosting.

At Name Hero we consider our Shared Hosting simply Web Hosting or Basic Web Hosting as all accounts are placed on our high-speed cloud that has the ability to instantly scale for more resources on-demand.  I like to consider it shared hosting on steroids.

With that said there is still a different between the two.

Shared Hosting Is For Single Websites

Our Shared Hosting packages have been specifically designed for single websites for individuals and small businesses that get 1,000 visitors or less per day.

We have completely optimized our platform for popular content management systems including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

We currently offer three different shared hosting packages:

The main difference between these packages is the amount of disk space offered as well as the number of add-on domains per account.

The average WordPress website uses around 500MB – 1GB of disk space.  However, if you host a lot of media files, such as photos and videos you may use much more.

If you don’t use a third-party email provider such as G Suite or Zoho mail, you’ll often find email takes up a good portion of your disk usage, especially for those that don’t regularly clear their inbox or spam folder.

Add-on domains allow you to host additional domains inside your cPanel account. This is especially helpful if your business uses multiple websites.  It however shouldn’t be a solution to host additional websites for clients as everything is inside a single cPanel.

Most individuals and small businesses go with the Basic Plus as it has plenty of space as well as the ability to host more than one domain.  We have however created the Business package for websites that are right in between shared hosting and VPS hosting.  Those that are reaching more than 1,000 visitors a day but not quite 5,000.

All of our Shared Web Hosting accounts have the following limits:

Limits Per cPanel Account

• Disk Space: Allocate from master plan
• Bandwidth: Allocate from master plan
• Virtual Memory: 2048MB (2GB)
• Physical Memory: 1024MB (1GB)
• Concurrent Connections: 25
• Number of Processes: 100
• I/O Limit: 2048KB/s
• I/O operations per second: 1024
• Inodes (soft/hard): 100,000 / 250,000

Our business package offers the ability to upgrade the physical memory as well as the Inodes.

VPS Hosting Is For High Traffic Websites

Our VPS Hosting has been designed for individuals and small businesses that have the demand for more resources and server customizations.

Most individuals will choose our VPS hosting if their website reaches more than 5,000 unique visitors a day or if they require specific software for their website or application to function.

We currently offer four different cloud VPS (virtual private server) configurations:

Since each of these servers are deployed on-top of our high-speed cloud, customers can enjoy the flexibility of being able to automatically add more resources on demand from right inside of our interface.

This is especially helpful to those customers who offer seasonal websites / products.  For example, during the holiday season some shopping websites may reach a lot more visitors than during normal months.  We make it extremely easy for them to scale their physical memory so visitors can arrive at their site without a lag.

The main difference between all of our VPS hosting configurations is the disk space, physical RAM, and CPU cores.

As mentioned above, the average WordPress website only uses around 500MB – 1GB of disk space.  However, those that are hosting large amounts of media, or perhaps have large customer databases are going to need much more disk space.

The physical RAM is what delivers the “speed” to the server.  If you’re using a lot of PHP applications and getting a lot of traffic, you’ll find that the server requires more memory to function at a high rate of speed.  Customers reach tens of thousands of visitors a day need as much RAM as possible to ensure a smooth browsing experience.

Finally the CPU cores is the number of processing cores that the server has access to to complete certain tasks.  For example, the Apache web server may need up to 2 CPU cores to be able to deliver all the visitors to a specific website while mySQL may need to share that processing power as well.

Unlike our shared hosting packages, our VPS hosting packages are only limited by the physical capabilities of the server meaning they can reach much higher limits.

What Solution Is Best For My Website?

I frequently tell customers, that if they need a VPS, they’re probably going to know it before signing up.

The average small business or individual website is fine on shared hosting.  But the larger websites / applications that require server customization need a VPS.

Prior to starting Name Hero, I personally always used my own VPS for my websites as I wanted full root control over the server. While a VPS is more expensive, you are dedicated to the entire machine, which in my opinion justifies the cost especially when you’re needing a lot of power.