What's the Difference Between Shared and VPS hosting? Print

Navigating the waters of web hosting account types and sizes can be tricky for people who are not well-versed in technological terms. How do you know what type of account to order? What the heck is a "VPS?" How is it different from a Dedicated server? Why should you care about what kind of processor you have?

We understand it's confusing - it's ok; we're here to help.

This article is a work in progress - please don't hold its unfinished state against us! We wanted to get the basic information out there for people as quickly as possible.

We like to use a housing analogy to describe the various account types - that way, we're using language everyone understands.

The Shared Account

A shared account is the basic web hosting account, held by tens of millions of websites all over the world. For sites that are not high-traffic, a shared account is ideal because they are cheaper than VPS or Dedicated accounts.

The housing analogy: A shared web hosting account is like renting a room in a house. You have your own, small private space (your room,) and you share major facilities like the kitchen, living room and bathroom. In hosting terms, your private room is your home directory - no one else can put their stuff in your home directory. It is yours alone. However, you share major server resources with other customers, such as CPU, RAM (memory,) network connectivity, and some software packages.

Pros and Cons of a Shared Account:

• Pros
  • Very affordable - our basic shared account starts as low as $9.99 per month!
  • A great way to get started with an online presence
  • Lots of resources - even though they are shared, there is still a lot of CPU and RAM to go around
  • Fully-supported by Home-Cooked Support
  • No need for customer intervention for system issues
  • Very easily scaled across the three shared account hosting types
• Cons
  • As with renting a room in a house with other people, you are subject to each other's doings in the server. Because everyone is sharing the main resources, there may infrequently be times when two roommates are competing for the same resource at the same time - Think of this as someone hogging the bathroom when you need to use it. While we have automated scripts in place to make sure people aren't hogging the virtual bathroom, there may be moments when two processes require the same resource at the same time. Sometimes, the second person must wait briefly - but in computer terms, "briefly" is usually a matter of microseconds, instead of hours for someone taking a long, hot bath.
  • The IP address of a shared server is more likely to be blacklisted by parties like AT&T, Google, and so on, because of the sheer volume of email coming from it.
  • Less ability to customize. Just as landlords have rules about painting living rooms bright turquoise, our shared servers have rules about what "tenants" are allowed and not allowed to do.
  • Outbound email is restricted to 500 per hour
  • Root access not allowed
  • Must have cPanel