Is virtual hosting any better than shared hosting?

Question

Is there any real performance gain on a virtual hosting over a shared hosting? Do you recommend any virtual hosting costing bellow $100?

Answer 1

Clearly, it depends on your requirements. I'm not sure you'll necessarily get much more performance. It's more important from a configuration and flexibility point-of-view. I wouldn't pay for a VPS package just to install Wordpress or Drupal.

For more custom software the VPS gives you much more control, and often at reasonable prices. The best thing about the VPS for me was that it gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about running unix machines and their configuration for running web services.

Answer 2

I have been using 1and1 Windows VPS service for almost 6 months without any issues. Great price and good service. One of the serious drawbacks with VPS is that you usually can't install any software that requires kernel level drivers, such as backup software and such. Other than that having a VPS instead of shared hosting allows me to configure SSH and self signed certificates for encrypted administrative logins.

As for performance I never used a shared host so I can't compare the difference between the two but I have been more than pleased with the speed and reliability of the VPS solution.

Answer 3

I switched from shared to a virtual hosting solution, I feel that the performance is better, but the most important feature that you'll get, it's having almost total control of your server.

You can almost install anything on your host, you own it, and for that I think it worth's the price.

Answer 4

The answer is "it depends." Shared hosting is usually defined as having non-privileged access to a server along with multiple other users. You are not able to start/stop services, deploy custom system applications (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and usually cannot edit things like Apache configuration files (which is why .htaccess files were born). The resources are managed by the host and you share with others. If one site uses all the resources other sites will suffer.

VPS solutions offer more isolation and give you some kind of "root" control. This is accomplished through chrooting, UML or virtualization, usually. More control over your environment is afforded and the isolation is greater, depending on the mechanism used.

I would recommend looking at http://slicehost.com for a high-quality, low-cost modern VPS solution. Slicehost offers VMs on Xen hypervisors enabling you to run one of several Linux distributions. Prices start at $20/mo for 256M RAM slice. Select your distro and set up the server as you see fit.

If you want a shared hosting-type platform that does not require setting up the server look at http://mosso.com's Cloud Sites offering. This is not "shared" in the traditional since, but a "cloud" cluster of resources to host PHP, ASP, .NET, Ruby on Rails applications with MySQL or MSSQL database backends. Load the application and data and allow the Mosso admins to manage hardware and all the system and services for you. Unlike shared hosting if you need more resources the "Cloud" delivers them automatically.

Other alternative exist, such as Amazon's EC2.

Hope that is helpful.

Answer 5

Occasionally on shared hosting you'll get issues where one customer's actions affect everyone on that server (e.g. they get slashdotted, or hacked). This is a performance issue you wouldn't see with a VPS. The flipside of that is, if no one else is using much resource on a shared server - you'll get much more than you're paying for. With VPS you're limited to the spec of your VPS.

For recommendations look on www.webhostingtalk.com. Allways a great resource for reading first hand accounts of peoples' experiences with hosting, and getting a good feel for the products that are out there at different price points.

Answer 6

If you're still considering, you might think about security as well. If a shared server is compromised, every site on the machine is potentially at risk. And "compromised" could mean "some other customer's insecure app was hacked" -- it doesn't have to mean that the server itself was exploited directly.

In the last few months I've seen two different business-card-style sites (with nothing but a handful of static-HTML pages) serving out malware, unbeknownst to the sites' owners. In both cases the sites were hosted by big-name providers.

I would expect that virtual-hosting is marginally-to-significantly less prone to this sort of problem, because of the sandboxing described in another answer.

Answer 7

I my opinion, virtual hosting is much better than shared hosting because of

1. freedom: you can change hosters at anytime, as any vps hosting will be exactly the same to your apps. With shared you are going to have to replicate your settings through different clickomatic interfaces
2. privacy: you are more protected against your co-hosted reading your files
3. control: of course. You are root.

Not that this is not the only choice. You can opt for dedicated servers on shared disks, starting at 10 euros/month at ovh.com for instance (what they call a "RPS"). Or you can get full dedicated hosting for 30e/mo (dedibox)

On VPS, 2 impressive cheap performers are linode & slicehost. Their performance and reliability is stunning, even for just $20/mo.

Answer 8

This applies to any scenario, but: buyer beware.

We moved to a virtual server to host our online store. It worked great for two months--then the massive RAID array at the hosting company that housed us and 100 other virtual servers died. It was 48 hours before they could get things up and running again; we were running our "backup server" (a desktop underneath my desk) in the interim.

So, no matter what you choose, make sure they have an SLA. And an SLA alone is not good enough (our hosting company broke theirs, obviously): make sure they have a backup plan in place and make sure that you have one, too.

In other senses, it depends on your requirements. If you need to do weird things like register COM objects or run in full trust, then a virtual server or a dedicated server is probably going to be your only option, anyway. If you can get by with a low-traffic web site in a partial trust environment, why make things complicated? Go with a shared host, and have an alternative shared host sitting ready as your failover backup.

Answer 9

Hello,

Surely its the best option ahead of shared Web Hosting, With VPS you get root access to your server and can control your activities on your own, much more easier than shared environment.