Web servers and hosting 101
This one’s a mess to untangle, but I’ll try to simplify it.
Shared hosting:
This is the last train home on a Saturday night, after a big football match, with rival fans mixed with happy drunks, packed in like sardines.
It’s cheap, I’ll give you that, but it assumes all the people on the train will behave. Only needs one or two to kick off and everyone suffers.
With web hosting, if one or two websites start hogging the resources – whatever the reason – all the other websites slow down. Even then, it’s not so straightforward as it depends on how well it’s managed, whether the hosting company notices and acts, and what resources (CPU, memory etc.) they allocated. e.g. Hostgator: what is shared hosting
To put it into perspective, you can get a shared server for under £5 a month and host “unlimited websites on it.” In reality, you will struggle to squeeze more than 40 sites into it, but if you are charging clients £60 a year for hosting, that’s a couple of thousand pounds profit.
VPS: virtual private server:
This is the next step up. If it were a train, this might be the 5 pm London to Liverpool, and you have a first-class reserved seat. But if it’s packed and someone in 2nd class kicks off, it’s gonna spill over.
Here a VPS will start around £25 a month, with fixed resources. Much better, right?
One web designer has a low-end VPS (say 2Gb RAM, 2-core) and is hosting 10 small sites. Another has upgraded (to 8Gb RAM and 4-core) but hosts 50 small sites. Both will simply tell you they offer “VPS hosting”, and it’s the same price, but which is the best?
e.g Hostgator: what is VPS
Dedicated server
This is first class, it could be a private limo or even a private jet. Forget mixing with the lower classes. You have it all, VIP lounge, door-to-door service. No riff-raff.
And it only starts around £100 a month. 20x the price of a Shared server, but you can stretch your legs out. Totally worth it!
Again, it depends on how many the web developer decides to pack into the server, it also depends if it’s managed and, if so, how well. And other factors. There should be no unpleasant surprises though, like your server falling over because some viral post on one site out of a thousand overloads the server.
Cloud server
This is somewhere between just below VPS and just above dedicated. Bit of a grey area as it depends massively on the resources and configuration and back-end of the offering.
So, using Cloudways as an example, their cloud options (ignoring offers) range from $12 a month to $226 a month. Rocket.net, who I use, range from ($30 to) $100 to $1,600 and up to $2,600 a month (after that it’s “let’s talk”).
Unless you know what you are getting, a bland “we offer cloud hosting” is as vague as it gets. It has flaws, but it can scale up more gracefully if there’s a sudden surge in traffic.
Feature image by Schäferle, from Pixabay
