shared hosting or vps

[Jon von der Heyden]

Hi

I'm trying to decide what hosting a customer of mine needs. I've been looking at different packages and spoken to a potential host - who speaks a dialect of geek that I just don't understand.

By the seems of it shared hosting gives me all of the tools I need, and for much less. I need MySQL DB's, loads of email addresses, FTP accounts etc. The customer website is fairly basic - a bunch of landing pages, a WordPress subdomain and an area for customers to log in and edit files using SkyDrive's Excel Web App.

I'm told that VPS offers better domain management, quicker backups and a faster processor. What does this actually mean? Will the pages load faster? Will the visitors experience be improved when filling in web forms etc? Or doesn't it actually make much difference?

I'm looking to draw experiences from existing members...

 

[Kyle123]

Shared would probably suffice, you should get all you need from it. In a nutshell a VPS gives you a full computer (albeit virtual) and shared means that you are given access to part of a computer where you can upload files to host. You will get more processing power with a VPS simply because (usually) you are guaranteed a processing speed (same thing with RAM), this isn't the case with shared since you'll be in contention with everyone else that's sharing the processing power - so you're at their mercy much like broadband contention.

As for databases, if you go for VPS, you'll be rolling your own instance of MySQL so you'll (probably) be able to have as many as you like - they're usually charged per db on shared.

As for sub domains, on a VPS you've got more options than with shared (which will probably charge per sub domain).

How much this matters very much depends on what the site actually does, if it's only a wordpress site and you aren't doing anything processor intensive (which is unlikely for a standard wordpress site unless you have a huge amount of dynamic content and you get a huge amount of visitors) then shared will probably suffice. It's probably not going to make your pages load any faster, processing power as far as simple websites are concerned is more about the number of concurrent users - serving up pages, especially if they're cached properly is very light work.

So A VPS is more of an All-in solution if you want more control over your environment, so if you need to do things like run a certain version of PHP or MySQL, or you want to do things like have full control over cron jobs (like windows task scheduler), install custom software packages and applications for back end server work, then you need a VPS. Though all this comes at a price both in terms of cost and time, the solution is more expensive since it requires more resource from he hosting company and it's more costly in terms of time since in all likelihood, you'll be responsible for updating the operating system, applying security patches, configuring access, upgrading PHP etc.

You don't have to do any of this in shared, but you couldn't even if you needed to.

There's a lot of probablys and usuallys in there, but it's because different hosting providers give you different things, and have different methods of pricing. Not all providers are equal, I've just assessed various providers as we've just switched our VPS at work, it's a nightmare - I'm not looking forward to the next time we do it!!

Does that help any?

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Thanks Kyle! You are steadily becoming my go-to guy on all issues