When you are preparing to launch a website, it is important to choose a web hosting plan that fits both your needs and your budget. Various types of hosting are available. Two affordable options for small businesses are shared hosting and VPS hosting.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a budget option for people who plan to start a business and expect to initially receive only a few hundred visitors a day. With this kind of hosting, you share server space and bandwidth with other website owners. This limits the amount of control you have over your site and can increase your security risk. Sharing bandwidth also means that high levels of traffic to other people’s sites could affect the performance of your own. There are usually limits on the number of email accounts you can set up on your domain, which is why this kind of hosting is only used by companies with a small number of employees.

If you simply need to host a website and a couple of blogs, shared hosting could be an affordable option for you. If your website starts to attract a lot of traffic as your business grows, you can always upgrade your hosting package to add more storage space or switch to another type of hosting.

VPS Hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. With this kind of hosting, a single server is split into multiple virtual servers. When you purchase a VPS web hosting package, you rent the use of one of these virtual servers. VPS hosting provides more control over the configuration of your server than shared hosting, which means you can run your own batch files inside the server and use custom firewall configurations. On the other hand, some applications have problems running in virtualized environments

VPS hosting usually provides plenty of space and bandwidth, which means you will have more resources to manage your website traffic and run all the web applications you want. You will also enjoy a greater capacity to create more email accounts for your employees. It is a good choice if you expect your traffic to grow significantly over the next few months or if you plan to host multiple websites.

Separation between the virtualized servers means VPS hosting may provide superior security over what shared hosting is able to offer. Therefore, VPS hosting may be a better option if you plan to handle sensitive or confidential data in your business.

The main disadvantage of VPS hosting compared to shared hosting is its higher cost. Another potential disadvantage is that you need a dedicated system administrator to manage the server.

Shared vs VPS Hosting

Shared hosting is a good option if you want a simple first website. However, after a while you may want to upgrade to VPS hosting. You may choose to make the switch if your website requires more resources than your current shared hosting can provide or you need to have more control over your server settings.

All good hosting companies provide both shared and VPS hosting solutions. It’s best to look at the technical specifications of the hosting plans they offer to see which one is right for you.