Web Hosting

"Which Hosting Plan Should You Choose?"

Shared hosting, Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Server?

These are generally the 3 types of web hosting plan available, but which one best suits your needs now? Let's take a close look on each of them and then we shall decide on the best plan for you.

Shared Hosting

Multiple websites are hosted on a single server, so each website account ends up "sharing" server space, bandwidth and resources with other accounts.

In other words, you do not have a private server space for yourself, thus you have very little control over your own applications.

Just like when you're sharing a room with your room mates, all resources in there had to be shared.

And because of that, shared hosting is very cheap and is most suitable for small time online businesses.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)

With this technology, you have more control over your own applications because you're allocated a private server space for your own applications.

You get a guaranteed share of the server CPU, disk input/output and network.

But still, you're sharing the resources with other VPS accounts on a server, just that you have more privacy and more control over certain resources than you're in shared hosting.

Just like you have your own room in a house, you have full control over everything inside the room, but you can't monopolize the entire resources in the house because you're sharing the house with other occupants.

Simply put, you're getting the features of dedicated hosting in a shared environment but taking a step backwards in performance compared to dedicated hosting.

That's why the price is lower than that of dedicated hosting but a little higher than that of shared hosting.

VPS plan is more for those moving up from shared hosting but not quite ready for dedicated hosting yet.
Dedicated Server Hosting

This hosting plan enables you to own an entire server; its pre-installed core hardware and software resources, physically to yourself (but the server will be remotely manned and managed by the web hosting company).

Just like you own a house, and you're the only one living in there. You have 100% complete control over ALL the resources.

Technically, the main advantage of dedicated hosting over VPS and shared hosting is the power for you to install scripts that require root access or account level access, unlike VPS and shared hosting that only allow you to install scripts at account level access only.

Obviously, this plan is more expensive due to its capability to provide your websites with a higher level of performance, security, speed, and uptime etc.

So, which plan suits you best?

If you've just started out in this Internet thing, and you're not so technical savvy or you simply hate to deal with technical stuffs, then I'd suggest you to take up the cheaper shared hosting plan first.

This is also especially beneficial to you if you're on a tight budget.

Most webmasters start off with shared hosting plan and then slowly move up to Virtual Private Server (VPS) and finally to dedicated server hosting as their experience, knowledge, skills and income grow.

Of course if you think you want to take a big step forward plus you're technical savvy and want to exercise more control over your website hosting such as running and installing your own applications and scripts, managing your own configuration files, network, DNS and much more... then bypassing the shared hosting plan and subscribing straight to a VPS or a Dedicated Server on a monthly basis may be your best bet.