VPS Hosting Vs Dedicated Server - How To Compare What You Get.

When most businesses first have a website developed for themselves, their web designer organizes web hosting for them on a shared server somewhere. During the years the website normally grows and gets more visitors. The company also learns that a shared hosting account has many limitations and sooner or later they often start investigating the possibility of upgrading to a VPS or a dedicated server. In this short discussion we will try to highlight some of the factors involved in a decision between VPS Hosting Vs Dedicated Server - How to Compare the pros and cons.

Since so many companies start with a shared hosting account, we will first explain what that is. In this case you simply buy a certain amount of disk space and data transfer per month on a shared server. Your website will share everything on the server with each of the other websites on that server.

The number of websites on a shared server can run into hundreds and even be more than a thousand. The drawback of all this is if even one of those websites uploads a script that brings down the server, your website will also go down. If any one of them sends out thousands of SPAM emails which blocks the mail server, your email will also stop functioning.

The need to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server is therefore a logical one that develops over time for most businesses. The letters VPS is an abbreviation for Virtual Private Server. To a large extent a VPS functions in much the same way as a dedicated server. You have your own private share of the server's hard drive, a fixed share of memory and a certain percentage of CPU which is guaranteed for your use.

That means that under normal circumstances your website will not be affected if the guy on the VPS next to you uploads a bad script or uses too much RAM. Your VPS will also have it's own mail queue which means if one of the other VPS accounts tries to send out too many emails it will not affect you.

Another advantage of a VPS is that it's much cheaper than a dedicated server. Although the price is much higher than that of shared hosting, you could get a decent VPS account for 20% of what a dedicated server would cost you ' depending on your space and bandwidth requirements.

One of the limitations of a VPS is that it still shares the basic hardware of the main server with a few other VPS accounts. If a mechanical failure occurs somewhere on the main server all VPS accounts will stop to function.

A dedicated server is the ultimate solution for those wanting full control of their online data. You can upload any script or program and nobody else can cause a software issue that will bring your server down ' except yourself.

The downside of this is that you will need much more technical knowledge than if you were renting a VPS. You need to know how to do basic server maintenance. Many servers use the Unix/Linux operating system, which involves a programming language with which many of us are unfamiliar. This is also the most expensive option of the two.

There is a solution to this problem though: a managed dedicated server. Being the most expensive of the options it gives you the freedom and flexibility of a dedicated server without the need to have any technical knowledge. The hosting company will handle all the technical and software issues.

In this short article we attempted to highlight the primary differences between VPS Hosting Vs Dedicated Server - How to Compare the features and how to make a choice based on facts.