Please note that everything in this article is based on my research and opinion.
Shared Hosting is a website hosting service where your website is hosted on a server which is sharing the CPU, RAM and Bandwidth resources with many other websites.
On a shared hosting environment, not only your website is sharing resources with other website owners, but also that shared hosting server more likely running other services such as DNS services, email services, database services, etc.., so your website is sharing server resources with many other small businesses who are running their business domain email accounts, databases, and domains DNS services on the same server.
There are hosting companies who are offering shared web hosting services as low as $1 per month, but the average shared web hosting cost is about $10 per month to $15 per month for business class hosting. More likely the hosting company who offers shared hosting as low as $1 per month may host hundreds of thousands of websites and email accounts on one medium performing server.
You may ask, what is the issue with sharing server resources with
thousands of other accounts / users; well, the main issue is that if a
user hogs most of the server's resources, your website's performance will
suffer or may come to a halt. Or if a website on the same server gets
hacked or compromised, this may create security issues, that website is
going to hog server's resources by possibly sending hundreds of thousands
of email spam, and you will be sharing the same IP address as the
compromised website.
Also, remember that Google starts to rank websites based on their
performance, so if your website is running sluggish, Google ranks it lower
and your website visitors will have poor experience browsing your website.
The other big issue with shared hosting services besides having to share resources is customer service and what happens in the event that your website is down or the shared hosting server is down. If you're paying a very low monthly hosting fee, sharing resources with hundreds of thousands of users, when your website is down, do not expect a quick turn around time to get your website backup or being able to get a hold of the cheap hosting customer service.
Does these major issues with shared hosting mean that you should never sign up with shared hosting? I would say if you have a basic website that does not need much server resources to run, then a shared hosting service should be sufficient for your website hosting; however, if I were you, I would not go for the cheapest hosting service, maybe look for a shared hosting provider that has the reputation for server reliability, performance and support and provides business class shared hosting, hopefully under that type of business class hosting, the hosting company is putting an effort to keep the number of users on each shared hosting server to a reasonable limit and hopefully that hosting company has a plan in place to restore your website within a reasonable timeframe if your website goes down.
So, here are the pros and cons of shared hosting services:
VPS hosting is one level above shared hosting when it comes to monthly cost and allocation of server resources. The average VPS hosting cost is about $40-$50 p/month.
With VPS hosting, the VPS hosting company provides and allocates a certain amount of RAM, CPU and disk space to your account. If you ever sign up with VPS, you will notice that as you add more RAM, the cost of VPS hosting goes up substantially. It is important to know that a website, especially an application may use more RAM than CPU and sometimes cost of having more RAM may be higher than cost of having additional CPUs.
There are different types of VPS hosting:
So, if you have a website or an application that needs to have more dedicated RAM and CPU, and you're looking for the more cost effective option, then a VPS hosting maybe your best bet.
So, here are the pros and cons of VPS hosting services:
Dedicated hosting is one level above VPS hosting when it comes to monthly
cost and having access to server resources.
With dedicated hosting, you will have access to the entire server and all
its resources.
It is important to know that there are two main types of dedicated hosting:
It is also important to know that there are many levels of services for Managed Dedicated Server Hosting, for example:
* Hosting companies offer their own naming schemes or categories or options for different levels of managed hosting services. The above list of different managed hosting options is just an example.
Managed Dedicated Hosting usually includes setting up the server OS and
the other server software such as the web server, database server, etc...
Then on top of setting up the server, the hosting company may provide
backup and restoration service, server security services and other service
options based on higher monthly cost.
Managed Dedicated Hosting has a higher monthly cost, but if you're not a technical person
and if you need help with installing and maintaining the server software and your application,
then managed dedicated server hosting service should be a better option for you.
Unmanaged Dedicated Hosting usually includes setting up the server OS and
you take the responsibility of installing and maintaining the server software and your web
application.
The cost for Unmanaged Dedicated Hosting is usually much lower because you
will be responsible for installing the server software, installing your
web application, and setting up the backups.
If the server goes down, the hosting company restores the server just to
server OS and it's your job to start over installing server software and
restore your web application.
So, unless you're a highly technical person, or you have a technical team
with specialty and experience dealing with servers, then you want to stay
away from unmanaged hosting services.
So, here are the pros and cons of dedicated hosting services:
Cloud Hosting is a hosting environment where the Cloud service provider
can allocate a certain number of CPUs, a certain amount of RAM, disk space
and bandwidth to an account.
Cloud hosting service is similar to VPS hosting as it relates to having
the option of the allocation of certain amount of RAM, disk space and
CPUs, but they are based on different technologies.
The main difference between Cloud and VPS is that Cloud provides an option
to have an exorbitant amount of resource allocation, especially bandwidth
allocation because Cloud technology usually uses the resources of multiple
servers.
Also, Cloud service provides the option to purchase Cloud servers and
bandwidth per hour.
One of the main advantage of the Cloud over dedicated server is how
quickly you can deploy (setup) a Cloud instance and how quickly you can
clone your existing instance and copy it to a new bigger instance.
For example, if you setup a Cloud based on 4GB RAM, 2 CPUs and 100 GB disk
space, and you setup your web application on that Cloud setup and you
start running out of RAM, you can quickly create a new Cloud instance for
double the existing server resources and copy your existing image into a
newly setup instance. This process can be done fairly quickly, sometimes
less than 30 minutes.
There are some misconceptions or biased opinions out there about Cloud services being much more reliable than dedicated server hosting; this is because some articles are written by Cloud service providers promoting their Cloud over dedicated server hosting and some articles are written by someone copying another person's article and opinion. Although usually Cloud services are running on multiple redundant servers which should make the technology more reliable, Cloud technology is more complex in nature and especially when the Cloud service provider focuses too much on increasing the number of subscriptions and falls behind on maintaining and keeping the infrastructure up-to-date, there are more risk of major cloud services outages. Recently there have been a few major Cloud outages due to glitches in part of the technology or misconfiguration or due to the Cloud provider not keeping their infrastructure properly monitored and maintained.
Another disadvantage of Cloud over dedicated servers is the monthly cost
when a lot of server resources are needed. For example, if your
application uses a lot of RAM, CPUs and Storage, the Cloud services could cost you much more than the dedicated server hosting
For example, if you need 128 GB RAM, *20-30 Core CPU and 1 TB SSD Storage, in most situations, based on today's pricing:
One other disadvantage of Cloud hosting services that I have noticed is that some of the large Cloud service providers have exorbitant number of users, for example, Amazon AWS has over one million users, so not only you will be one in a million user, supporting so many users using senior level staff may not be feasible, so realistically, it will not be possible for those Cloud hosting companies to have that many senior level support staff to support that many clients, so if you run into any issues with you application, unless you sign up with an enterprise support, which the starting cost is at around $10,000+ plus per month, you may not be able to receive a quality support when you have a critical server or application issue.
So, here are the pros and cons of Cloud hosting services:
Final Thoughts
