If you have a great website that’s starting to attract a lot of visitors, you’re likely beginning to wonder about the potential benefits of upgrading to a new hosting plan. For many companies, this boils down to two choices: VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated hosting.
In this article, we’ll be discussing a few fundamental questions that may come up, such as: “Is dedicated hosting worth the extra cost?”, “Are dedicated servers the faster option?”, and “Can a website ever actually outgrow a VPS server?” — plus we’ll also be looking at few examples of industry-leading hosts offering each type of service. By the end, you’ll hopefully be able to make a well-informed decision about which of these two web hosting technologies is the right one for your own particular online endeavor.
Servers And Hosting Plans
To start with, let’s go over a few hosting-fundamentals, like the difference between a server and a hosting plan.
A server is pretty much just a computer with a hard drive, a CPU, some memory, and bunch of input/output ports — in many ways, it’s actually very similar to your computer at home. Independent of whether you get a VPS or a dedicated plan, it stands that the bigger and more powerful the hardware in the server, the faster your site will potentially be able to run.
Some of the above-mentioned hardware components are particularly important when it comes to selecting a server plan. Some of these are:
The speed of the CPU
The amount of available memory
The amount of storage/disk space
So what, then, makes choosing a server so problematic? The answer lies in two other factors that contribute to your server environment — your hosting plan and how these hardware components are actually used within the server.
A hosting plan is more than just a server. A hosting plan is made up of both the server and a number of management services such as core software upgrades, various security protocols (i.e. malware scans and automatic virus removal), and general performance monitoring, to name just three. To accurately judge the suitability of a hosting plan, you should be aware of the following factors:
The server hardware
The various Management services included
How the hardware is used
The last item on our list — how the hardware is used — is more or less what separates VPS and dedicated hosting plans. So, let’s move on…
Dedicated And VPS Hosting
With dedicated hosting plans, there’s only one user who gets to use ALL of the hardware on the server. In contrast, with a VPS hosting plan the server’s hardware can be used by a number of different users.
A dedicated hosting plan can be thought in a similar way to your own regular computer. You own all of the hardware and you and you alone have access to all of the resources available.
A VPS, on the other hand, can be likened to a computer that’s being shared by multiple users. Imagine an office with a single computer and four employees. An individual mouse, keyboard and screen are hooked up to the computer for each user. In total, this one computer has four monitors, four keyboards, and four mice. Each user is running a separate version of Windows and each user is allotted a maximum of exactly one fourth of the available disk space, memory, and CPU speed.
VPS servers use “virtualization” technologies to effectively split their resources between multiple users. If the hardware consists of a 500GB hard drive, 12GB of memory, and four people use the hardware they will each get 125GB of storage space and 3GB of memory.
MAIN DIFFERENCES
It’s important to understand that the only differences between VPS and dedicated servers that are worth highlighting all stem from how the hardware is used. Both VPS and dedicated hosting can offer low-end and high-end servers, and both can be blazing fast! Likewise, both services can come with automatic malware scanning and removal, yearly security audits, and more.
Some packages will include specific services for free, some will require you to pay a little extra; you’ll need to take a close look at the specific management services offered by whichever hosting company you’re considering.
Now, let’s turn our attention to the differences that stem from the architectures of the two types of services.
COST
This one is pure economics. If a hosting company can put more people on the same server, they can make these packages cheaper because their costs per customer will be lower. This makes VPS options much cheaper than their dedicated counterparts. Low-end VPS services start at $20/month, mid-range ones clock in at around $55/month, and high-end servers will set you back anything from $120/month or more.
While I have seen a $99/month dedicated server, a good-quality low-end product will usually be closer to $150/month. Mid-range solutions will be around $250/month, and from there on the sky is the limit. Depending on your own particular needs, a completely managed dedicated hosting plan may even set you back about $2,500/month — though this is usually for websites with tens of millions of visitors a month.
SECURITY
Dedicated servers are generally said to be more secure than VPS. This is because in addition to all the usual threats that any hosting plan must face, VPS servers have a particular weakness that dedicated don’t: the hypervisor.
Aside from having the coolest name ever, the hypervisor handles creating and managing each of the virtual machines (allotments) on the server. Most viruses only affect one virtual machine (i.e. a single user account), but in some very rare cases they may actually be advanced enough to bypass the hypervisor completely, spreading to all the accounts on the server.
CONFIGURATION
Configuration is one aspect where dedicated servers really stand out. Because you’re the only user on the system, you have near total-control over everything and can therefore do pretty much whatever you want with it — right down to changing various parts of its core software and or hardware.
By having full control over the server, you’ll be able to (as long as you have the skills) put together a configuration that’s just right for whatever site you’re running. Most users won’t ever need to — or want to — play around with such settings, but for those who need a very specific configuration in order to run a highly specialized application or other special cases, a dedicated server will likely be the only viable choice.
PERFORMANCE
Performance is largely related to the server’s hardware specifications. Given two servers with the same specifications, dedicated servers will always have a performance advantage over VPS servers — because they don’t have to share the resources between users and with a VPS server. It follows then, that the very high-end server configurations only really exist for dedicated users. If your website or enterprise really does need a monster amount of hardware to power it, then you’ll only be able to get this kind of power from one or multiple dedicated servers.
How To Choose Between VPS And Dedicated Hosting
First, let’s rule out cost. If your business isn’t yet generating enough to afford a dedicated server, then VPS hosting will almost certainly be a great choice. In fact, I generally recommend VPS to almost all online businesses. A good rule of thumb to follow is this: If your online enterprise isn’t generating enough money to cover the costs of a dedicated server, then chances are you’re nowhere near needing one.
Security is also easy to rule out. The additional security risk of a virus bypassing the hypervisor is so small that it rarely happens. If you’re starting a business based around security (i.e. legal, banking or government-related), you may want to consider a dedicated server for additional peace of mind, but for most other types of business it shouldn’t be much of an issue. It’s worth noting though, that there is no server in the world which is safe from attack if someone is bent on gaining access. What’s more, most security holes these days are created by websites and users using insecure code on the front-end of their website rather than from any fault of the server itself.
In my experience, the choice usually boils down to configuration and performance. For instance, if you absolutely must use a server with a very specific hardware configuration, you’ll need to go with a dedicated service that allows you to assemble your own physical server. Likewise, if you need to install special software, or you want to tune your hardware to make your software run as efficiently as possible, dedicated may be the only way to go.
It’s also worth noting there that unless you have an (expensive) arrangement with your hosting company that puts all of the day-to-day operations of running a dedicated server in their court, you’ll only really be able to utilize the additional power of running one if you have someone on your team with some seriously formidable server skills. If you don’t have anyone on the payroll who knows a lot about server technology, you’ll likely struggle to make proper use of — and maybe even be hindered by having to cope with — running a dedicated server.
Performance is a tricky issue. It’s all about hardware configuration. Not all dedicated servers are faster than VPS servers — and some may even be slower than VPS servers. Here’s an example: let’s compare a dedicated and a VPS plan, both from the same company:
VPS Dedicated
CPU Cores 6 4
Memory 6GB 4GB
Storage Space 90GB 1TB
Bandwidth 3TB 5TB
Price $90/month $195
As you can see, the VPS is probably a lot faster than its dedicated counterpart. You could say that the storage space and bandwidth are less, but this really has no impact on site speed. In fact, unless they want to store and serve videos on/from their own server, very few people will ever need as much as 90GB disk space.
As for bandwidth, this can indeed become a bottleneck. There is, however, a $150/month VPS plan at the same host which offers 5TB of bandwidth with eight cores and 10GB of memory. This is still a better price than the low-end dedicated solution!
So when is speed a decisive factor? I actually spoke to a SiteGround representative who was nice enough to be frank and talk numbers with me. He confirmed my suspicion — speed-wise, dedicated servers only beat VPS at very high volumes of traffic. The figure he quoted was about 500,000 page views a month, which is a considerable amount for most sites!
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