Choosing a hosting provider for your company is no easy task. Hosting affects everyone involved with managing and deploying data within your IT infrastructure. This includes everyone from server administrators to web/app developers to designers to webmasters.
As you can see, this is no easy decision for any type of company. There are several viable options out there for all sizes and company types, but navigating all the options out there can be a big overwhelming. In most cases, companies are faced with the choice between dedicated hosting or virtual private server (VPS) hosting.
While many hosting providers will list off a bunch of statistics and specifications used to entice web professionals, but choosing the right hosting provider is both a budgetary and performance matter.
Let’s take a look at some things to consider when looking at dedicated or VPS hosting providers.
VPS vs. Dedicated Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting – When it comes to choosing a hosting provider, dedicated hosting is often the gold standard. The problem with using the gold standard is that the cost tends to be pretty high. The big upsides have to do with control and performance. With dedicated hosting, administrators and other IT professionals have complete control over processes. For instance, IT pros can generally reboot their servers whenever they need to. On top of that, dedicated hosting can be fully customized to meet the needs of a company’s needs, which is often based on the type of software the servers are running. The other upside is that performance is fairly predictable since all hardware is managed from a single machine, and not a bunch of machines, as is the case with virtualized hosting.
- VPS-Powered Hosting – VPS hosting is a little more abstract. It’s easy to grasp the scope and power of dedicated hosting because it is a dedicated machine that powers data deliverability over the web. With VPS hosting, multiple virtualized servers share a single server. This is where things get confusing. Most people want to lump VPS hosting along with the large group of cloud hosting providers out there. The main difference is in computing power. There are some companies like Rackspace that blur the lines between cloud and VPS hosting, by hosting VPS technology in the cloud. However, by and large cloud services cannot really deliver on the CPU power offered with VPS hosting. Additionally, VPS hosting providers give the customer higher levels of control over server processes. This is where VPS hosting becomes a legitimate competitor for the dedicated hosting provider market. It offers the power and control of dedicated hosting without all of the extra overhead.
Conclusion
In short, the big difference between VPS and dedicated hosting comes down to cost. There are several nuances that divide the two, but in reality most companies can have similar levels of control and customization with a VPS hosting solution. Naturally, if your company is in the position to spend the money on more efficient control over server processes, dedicated hosting makes sense. However, most companies are not in a position to spend that kind of money on a dedicated solution.
