There are hundreds of reasons that you could be looking to build a website, but if you are even considering a VPS chances are you aren’t looking for a personal blog or a site to host your family tree, instead you might be looking for a place to do some web development, a stable place to host your business website or e-commerce site, or perhaps a site to market a product for your company. What it comes down to for you is Shared Hosting vs. VPS Hosting and whether the costs of each outweigh the benefits
Shared hosting is what most webhosts offer, unless they specify that you are getting your own server or VPS assume that you are getting a shared hosting plan. Shared hosting is exactly what it sounds like, a whole bunch of websites available on the same server, all using the same resources and using just a few different IP addresses amongst them. Many new businesses and people who are starting up personal web pages decide to use shared hosting to cut their expenses, the amount of money that can be saved this way can be significant and the whole process is very easy to use, but what are the costs?
Bad Neighborhood
Your shared hosting account is on a server with a whole bunch of other sites, they may contain content you don’t personally agree with on moral or ethical grounds, or just content that you don’t want associated with your business. People can find out what sites are coming from what servers, and you may be tarred with the same brush. Worse still the other sites may be running malicious scripts and your site could be banned from being accessed, from sending mail or any of a hundred other things that are totally beyond your control.
Greedy Neighbors
Your site will be running on a server getting requests for these other websites, if it turns out that one of them ends up being really popular and gets lots of traffic all at once, your site’s performance will suffer, and if your site’s performance suffers, your users will not be happy. It doesn’t even take a hugely popular site on your server to mess things up, poorly written scripts can eat server resources and leave your site responding slowly or not at all.
Big Fish, Small Pond
Shared hosting will restrict the availability of services, applications and technologies available to you, in addition to often having smaller bandwidth limits than VPS or Dedicated Server hosting plans. This means as your success grows and your website tries to grow with it you may run into serious issues, and the process of transferring a site out of shared hosting and into a VPS is not trivial.
VPS to the rescue! (maybe)
VPS solutions are not perfect, but they do provide many advantages over a conventional Shared Hosting option. If your website represents your business, it is good for your professional image that that website is available as often as possible, and that it responds in a timely manner and is not associated with sites containing illicit or explicit content. VPS Hosting gives you more control, more power, more reliability.
Your website is the online extension of your business, what does your hosting choice say about your company?