Shared Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting vs Cloud Hosting
Many people only look at hosting costs and overlook all the critical areas that affect website performance. Remember that the wrong choice in this regard can lead to slow website speeds, security-related issues, data loss, and server failures.
The managed hosting option is ultimately dependent on current and future growth plans and resource needs. That is why there are different types of hosting solutions available to meet different hosting needs. While all solutions look the same, each has its own pros and cons.
To choose the best solution in terms of hosting, you should think carefully about the following:
- Your monthly budget
- Daily traffic to your website
- Expected traffic spikes
- Your technical support requirements
- Security requirements
- Performance
Before comparison, we will know what is Shared, Dedicated and Cloud hosting?
What is shared hosting?
It is currently the most economical hosting solution and is suitable for medium traffic blogs (mainly storefronts) and business websites. In fact, multiple websites share the same resources (bandwidth, disk space, memory allocation) as one server. This solution is suitable for non-technical individuals as the host provides a complete management system and supports all features related to the hosting system (update, security, maintenance, backup, installation).
Shared hosting is not the best solution if your business requires a specific module, a special language, or another MySQL database.
Shared Hosting Benefits
• Pricing: The main benefit of shared hosting is the price. As you can imagine, choosing this solution will benefit you from a much more attractive offer.
• Ease of use: When launching a site, we look for a simple and effective solution that fits our needs. This is a big advantage of shared hosting. In fact, the offers offered are often well-defined, limiting the choices you have to make.
• Service and Performance: Everything is website dependent. If you can afford to experience slowdowns in exceptional cases, you can easily choose a shared server.
What is Dedicated Hosting?
For dedicated hosting, the full server is yours (whether rented or purchased). This type of hosting is ideal for websites that generate a lot of traffic and require a lot of resources (for example marketing, e-commerce, social networks). While no server can guarantee 100% security, a dedicated server is the best option if the security of your website is your priority. Because you don’t have to share bandwidth with other websites, dedicated servers are fast and you can host a lot of websites and the traffic is unlimited. However, they are more expensive.
Benefits of Dedicated Hosting
- Administrative Autonomy: When accessing the kernel (root) in the forehead, a dedicated server gives you the same level of autonomy as a traditional dedicated server. You can install and customize your apps and services.
- Performance Best performance: Shared hosting depends on client traffic, audience, and other interactions. Not so on a virtual dedicated server. You have your own resources and you are completely isolated from other servers.
- Security Advanced Security: Dedicated hosting benefits from installed security installed on the hosting server. Private, completely secure, and inaccessible to other clients, regardless of the rights in your file system and database server.
What is cloud hosting?
Cloud Server is quite close to the VPS hosting. The difference is that a VPS is based on a physical server, while a cloud is based on multiple servers, and virtual resources are distributed among several servers that work together to create a large virtual network (cloud). The cloud adapts to any need.
If the VPS has limited bandwidth and data transfer capabilities, cloud hosting can use the same resources over and over again. A VPS is a bit like trying to run your laptop on battery power; it will eventually end and your computer will shut down. If you plug it into the wall, you can use your laptop endlessly from a rotating power supply (cloud). This type of accommodation is suitable for most companies.
The most important thing to remember is that if you plan to grow, cloud hosting is probably a great option for you. For simplicity, this is VPS 2.0 only. Large companies like Google and Amazon host their servers in the cloud, so this surely has its advantages.
Finally, the cloud is very reliable because if one of the servers fails, your site will not shut down because it will use the resources of the other server in the cloud.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting
- Resources on Demand: Cloud servers allow you to request resources on the go and generally pay on time.
- High Availability: Unlike non-fixed physical servers without premises, virtual machines transfer data to another machine without downtime in the event of hardware failure. The stability of cloud hosting does not match in the area of web hosting.
- Scalability: With more resources and faster access to them, Cloud Host provides incredible scalability for customers. This is why this type of server is used for other cloud-based services, collectively known as cloud hosting.
Shared Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting
With shared hosting, many websites, including yours, share the same server and its resources. This type of hosting is ideal for projects that do not get much traffic and do not use a lot of resources.
Hosting areas for individual websites are limited and can accommodate websites with very different features. In terms of prices, shared hosting is the cheapest because you only rent a portion of the server space. Hosting solutions have serious performance limitations.
The main problem is the slow shared server speed, which translates into slow performance. If you expect an increase in traffic, shared hosting solutions will not be the solution as traffic will increase.
| Shared Hosting | Cloud Hosting | |
| Server Deployment and Management | No | Yes |
| Server Sharing Model | Shared Server | Dedicated Cloud Server |
| Scalability (auto/manual) | No | Yes |
| Low Cost | Yes | Yes |
| Pay As You Go | No | Yes |
| Flexibility | No | Yes |
| Customization | Depends on the vendor | Yes |
| Security | Depends on the vendor | Yes |
| Instant Provisioning | No | Yes (in managed hosting) |
| Performance | Slow | Fast |
| Reliability | Somehow | Yes |
| Multiple Data Centers | No | Yes |
On the other hand, cloud hosting servers offer you a secure and scalable solution for your website (s). You have complete freedom in choosing resources (RAM, processor, bandwidth, and storage) for your WordPress site (s).
For medium to high (or even unexpected) traffic volumes, cloud hosting is a good option. Since the performance of your WordPress website depends on the server resources of cloud hosting, the sudden increase in traffic volume is easily handled due to the increased availability of resources.
Performance
In a shared hosting environment is adequate with the resources of all sites on the server. If a website uses 1 GB of bandwidth then this 1 GB is fully supported and not available for other sites. Because of this, the performance can be affected by the number of websites on the server, the total resources of the server, and how many resources each person uses. In short, performance can vary greatly and depend on many things. Cloud hosting allows you to directly influence the performance of your website. You are given a fixed amount of resources, which you can increase or decrease depending on your budget and needs. Performance can be great if you use a very small amount of resources or buy a lot of virtual hardware.
Security
Although this point has been discussed, the security of shared hosting and cloud hosting is very similar. Although many websites can be hosted on one server, there is no way for another user to access other websites on the server until the security system is hacked. Cloud hosting is a bit more secure due to its customization, but in general, this difference is not really significant, unless you use a good shared host. Properly covered, it will withstand a lot of adverse conditions.
Failure Security
In the event of a server failure, the website crashes, regardless of the type of hosting you are using. Although the hosts try their best to avoid this by using server management and temperature-controlled rooms, failures can still occur.
While an outage can affect both, shared hosting and cloud hosting respond differently to this phenomenon. With shared hosting, it is a little trickier to connect a website quickly because files are assigned to a single server. However, because cloud hosts are virtualized and easy to move from server to server, websites hosted in the cloud can often go back online very quickly.
Pricing
Shared and cloud hosting prices vary depending on the web host as well as bandwidth, memory, and options, but it is still possible to determine average prices. Shared hosting prices typically range from $5 to $15 per month, although it can sometimes go up to $50 per month for some web hosts offering more resources. Cloud hosting is more expensive. You can choose between personal accounts, pay-as-you-go, or pay-per-CPU cycles. On average, you can expect to pay from $10 to $200 per month for good cloud hosting, but for website owners who require fewer resources, there are smaller accounts that cost less.
Dedicated Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting
The biggest drawback of dedicated hosting is that it can perform well in the event of a sudden increase in traffic as resources increase with increasing traffic and the ratio does not increase. Once the use of resources hits the upper limit, visitors begin to experience a sharp decline in their user experience, and the “404 pages not found” error occurs.
Although dedicated hosting is still seen as a better solution than shared hosting, it is not the ideal choice for high-traffic websites that need to provide visitors with advanced user experience. In many cases, experts suggest that websites that use dedicated hosting should consider a cloud-based hosting solution.
| Dedicated Hosting | Cloud Hosting | |
| Server Deployment and Management | Yes | Yes |
| Server Sharing Model | Dedicated Server | Dedicated Cloud Server |
| Scalability (auto/manual) | No | Yes |
| Low Cost | No | Yes |
| Pay As You Go | No | Yes |
| Flexibility | No | Yes |
| Customization | Yes | Yes |
| Security | Depends on the user | Yes |
| Instant Provisioning | No | Yes (in managed hosting) |
| Performance | Better than shared | Fast |
| Reliability | Somehow | Yes |
| Multiple Data Centers | Depends on the vendor | Yes |
Cloud hosting is very practical in terms of sudden spikes in traffic and in situations where the resource requirements of a website can increase as traffic increases. As your website grows, the cloud server adapts and provides the necessary resources to provide quality service without interruptions, while ensuring data security.
A cloud server is not limited by the physical capacity of a single server (dedicated server) or proximity to neighbors (shared hosting). Furthermore, cloud hosting allows you to adapt resources in just a few clicks without interrupting the service.
Performance
Cloud Hosting, users can benefit from both types of hosting. Cloud hosting allows you to adjust resources up or down as needed, making it a more flexible and economically attractive system. If your server demand is high, you do not need to pay for this capability permanently and you can automatically increase the capacity of your server to meet your demand. It’s like heating costs. Use when you need it when you need, and pay for what you use after the fact.
Unlike dedicated servers, cloud servers can run in hypersensitivity. The role of the hypersensitive is to control and allocate capacity depending on the use of the operating system. With cloud hosting, there are many cloud servers available for each client. This allows you to allocate computing resources to specific users as needed and as needed. For example, during high traffic activity, you can access more potential unless you need a website. Cloud servers also provide more redundancy. If one server fails, another server will replace it.
Security
Dedicated hosting servers are less vulnerable to security than other types of hosting because they are based solely on the experience of the user or system administrator. Therefore, users must monitor the security of their servers, take frequent backups, and install security patches and firewalls. Cloud hosting, on the other hand, allows hosting providers to handle all of these security-related aspects, so that you can focus solely on the content of your website.
Disaster Protection
Dedicated Hosting is a much more advanced form of hosting where customers get a full physical server. That is, the entire server is completely dedicated to it, without having to share it with other clients. In some cases, customers can also use many dedicated servers.
Although dedicated servers offer complete control over hosting, their disadvantage is that the required capabilities need to be pre-planned with adequate resources and processing power to handle the expected level of traffic. Underestimating these levels can create insufficient resources during busy periods of activity, while over-testing them can mean paying off unnecessary capacity. Their disadvantage is that they need to be planned in advance with the necessary resources and processing power to control the expected traffic level.
Cost
A dedicated server is more beneficial for users who want to access their server websites. With this type of server, the user can manage and customize their server. Although the prices are very high, this type of hosting is recommended if you want the best transfer quality and hyper-responsive customer support. The cost of a dedicated server varies greatly depending on the operation of the machine. However, it costs from $50 to $1,000 a month, which is far more expensive than shared hosting and cloud hosting.