Welcome !

I wanted to share my experience about Hosting in this article, which may give you some idea and decide which option is suitable for you. I just tried to keep it clear and simple, but the subject is a big one, so I ended up having the following. I hope it provides you a basic insight. Grab some beverage and go on reading.

If you are a new into the world of Web, you start with a free host which provides limited amount of space and a simple interface to manage your site, and they put ads on your site/blog in return as a cost for this free service. It is a perfect way to discover the world. However, as your site grows bigger and get some attention from people, you start to need a paid hosting, which offers considerable amount of space, no ads, increased service quality such as access speed, server availability and service up-time.

Paid hosting services can be divided into 3 different groups:

• Shared Hosting
• Virtual Private Server
• Dedicated Server

 

 Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting is the most suitable option for beginners. Why? Because you do not need to consider installing a Web Server, a Database Server and a PHP/ASP extension. You will have a ftp access to server, to upload,delete and modify your web site files, and also you will have a database account associated with this hosting account. There are not very complicated setup procedures to make your site working, all you need to copy your files to your root hosting directory and setup database connections if you are running a website which uses a database (Like WordPress). On the other hand there are some disadvantages with this kind of hosting plan.

For instance, introductory shared hosting plans support only single domain, which means that you can’t host multiple sites under single hosting plan, this is a huge disadvantage. Many people don’t bind to single site, they have several maybe many. But if you are willing to pay more for shared hosting like twice the price, they let you to host multiple web sites. But again this will cause you a lot of headaches. Why? I have started with shared hosting to blogging, as I started to have some traffic, I started to get warning mails from the hosting company, nagging about my sites use extra resources, so the overall quality of the other sites on the server are decreasing. Even they closed my account for this reason. So I recommend you to stay away from such shared hosting plans, unless you are a beginner with a single site, and minimal traffic.

So here are a list of advantages/disadvantages. Recently I was using MediaTemple, Grid service (which is a shared hosting plan), and I was paying $20 for this service, what is worst is that you have a so called GPU limit (1000 GPUs per month), which is amount of processing time allocated to you per month, if you overuse/excess this amount you are charged for extra bucks, most of the time I was paying extra $15-20 for the excessive usage. I was paying a total of $30-40 for a shared hosting and I told myself, this is B.S, I had to move on a VPS or something… Before than that I was using GoDaddy’s shared hosting plan, which was even worst, because they suspended my hosting account several times for overuse (they don’t allow even the smallest spikes in the traffic, this means to bye bye to digg or other social media, that can drive instant traffic to your site), meaning that all my sites were down for days, so this caused me hundreds of dollars, hundreds of visitors, and loss of prestige. Currently I am using Netdirekt’s VPS service. Paying 25 €uros, I’ll tell you later that this price is really optimal, if you compare performance, quality, limits and availability.

Advantages

• Easy to manage
• Considerably cheaper than VPS or Dedicated (starting from $3 per month)
• Ready for deployment (Generally no initial setup)
• Ready-to-use control panels (Varies among the hosting companies)
• Built-in statistics tracking

Disdvantages

• Limited amount of resource allocated to you. (small amount of drive space, max num of 20-25 databases and other such limits)
• Extra charges applied or Account is suspended  for over use of resources.
• No customization on the server, you have to stick what is installed.
• Can’t handle traffic spikes, (Even if they say it can, it CAN’T, they will be charging you with extra cash, this is not handling)
• Risk of losing your visitors as well as your prestige. (When your account is suspended, it may take days to fix the so called “problem”, so think about it, your sites will show, forbidden, 404 and etc.. for days)

 

Virtual Private Server

Don’t let the word “Virtual” bring you down, focus on the part “Private Server”, yes there is a sharing principle in this but you can’t pass the borders. What if you overuse, or overload it? Simply, you just affect your own availability, meaning that, all your websites hosted on this VPS will have a decreased service quality, you can only damage yourself.! Not the others… So think about a real hardware that is divided in to 4 VPS, and resources are allocated that no one can use others. This is not much different than dedicated server in the user perspective, not in the underlying hardware. Because in dedicated server, you are the only user of that hardware, and likely to have more processing power/capability.

Virtual Private Servers are offered in a broad range of choices. Only variance is in the prices, higher price is for to offer a ready system (everything is pre-installed) out of the box. Apache, PHP, MySQL are already installed, typically such system is called “LAMP”. Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP the fantastic four. So if don’t want to struggle anything, and you want everything to be ready, this may be the option. But if you ask me, If you don’t want to struggle anything, then why do you want to have a VPS? You may still go on using shared hosting by paying extra cash for extra resources. In my opinion,  just go for a from-scratch option, so by this way you may spend some money on extra hardware, such as instead of having 1GB RAM, you may have 2GB RAM. You just make an initial amount of effort for installing and setting up everything to have a running system. After all, you will be paying a lot less for every month than out-of-the-box system. Also you will be learning Linux, isn’t it awesome ?

Let’s compare VPS with a shared hosting account. In VPS, the most important thing is that you are the administrator (root) of the whole system. You have a shell access to do everything. You can install anything you want, you are the responsible for choosing the software. This may be an advantage if you are an experienced user.  You decide on everything. You can use all the available limit of the system. Probably you will not be facing with risk of suspended account or paying extra money. (If you want to earn some cash, so why the heck you will pay extra for a limited service.). Briefly you own that machine, do what you want with it. But as in always, power comes with responsibilities, don’t forget to schedule some auto-backup mechanism, because the company will not be offering any backups (unless you request so and pay more), you are responsible for any data loss, they are only responsible for hardware failures. Also another subject is Security. You are also responsible to secure whole system, and being aware of what’s going on. Besides these disadvantages, there is another advantage, generally the bandwidth limits are much more that shared ones, also the bandwidth is a lot bigger than the shared ones. Companies allows you to install different kinds of Linux distros, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Slackware and etc.. So you can choose your own flavor.

Currently I am paying 25 €uros per month for a VPS from Netdirekt.de with the following properties:

CPU: 2.000 MHz
Ram: 2048 MB
HDD: 250 GB
Traffic: 5000 GB
OS: Debian Lenny

When you compare it with a shared hosting like MediaTemple ’s Grid Service which costs $20-40 per month to me. There is no logical reason stay with such service, so I have moved VPS. Now, I freely playing with it, adding new websites easily and without fear of overuse of resources. So following list will present you a big picture about VPS.

 Advantages

• Freedom (You are free to change everything, you are the administrator)
• Customized configuration and softwares (You decide what to install)
• No risk of suspended account
• No limits, you may wish to use all available limit
• Increased speed, quality and availability than shared hosting
• Higher efficiency (Cost/Performance proportion is higher than shared hosting)

Disdvantages

• Initial effort to make whole system running (If you prefer a scratch one, not a ready system out of the box)
• Hard to manage for inexperienced users (but you’ll get used to it, you’ll gain experience time after time, remember “Rome was not built in one day”)
• You are responsible for backup & maintenance.
• You are responsible for your system security. (Be careful! This is a tough task)

Dedicated Server

Dedicated Server is similar with VPS in usage, you have Linux system with shell access, so you have the same degree of freedom. But Dedicated Server differs in hardware aspect. Because you are the only owner of the underlying hardware, so you may modify the hardware configuration as well as software. So in future, you may consider expansion, adding memory, disk space and etc… But this all means extra cost but if you are running a big business (large scale), this option is more suitable for you, since you have possibility to modify the actual hardware, according to your needs.

The biggest disadvantage is the cost. There are broad range of choices, but even a slower Dedicated Server will cost too much money. If you are serious about your business and gaining a lot much (4x-5x times) than the amount you are paying, then it’s worth paying for Dedicated Server, else VPS is surely enough. All the advantages and disadvantages of VPS applies to Dedicated Server and plus the following ones.

Additional Advantages over VPS

• You may alter the hardware configuration (Future upgrades)
• You are the only owner of the hardware
• Proportionally higher performance, speed and bandwidth

Additional Disadvantages over VPS

• Since, you are the only owner, your responsibility increases, so you need to spend more time on periodic maintenance & backups.
• Increased cost.

Before ending this post, I want to clarify that I didn’t mean say one is better than the other, in some cases one is preferable among others. Briefly, If you are beginner, go with a shared hosting, but if you feel that you are growing and earning some money that can afford VPS, don’t wait for the hosting company to push you to pay more for resources, or suspend your account, just switch to a VPS, and introduce yourself some degree of freedom. If you have started to gain some serious amount of money, then you can call it as a business, so go for a Dedicated Server.

Have Fun!

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