What do housing and hosting have in common guide, Online shared virtual private, Dedicated servers advice

What do housing and hosting have in common?

16 June 2022

The field of hosting is quite large as it is made up of many different concepts and server types that are quite overwhelming for new users and people without that much experience. While confusing at first, hosting can be quite simple to understand and navigate because it is very similar to another field – that of architecture and housing.

At a first glance you might be wondering – how, they are completely different! The reality is though that they share much of the same aspects. If your website is a house, then hosting is basically its foundation. Because of this, it is important to know what the different types of servers are and how to use them properly in order to make sure that your ‘house’ is sturdy and well-structured as it should not only be visually appealing but also structurally sound.

Main types of hosting

The 3 most common types of servers include shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. We are now going to go into more detail on each type, giving examples of how they work along the way.

Shared hosting – the cheapest of the bunch

To start things off, we are going to be looking at shared hosting. This particular hosting type has the advantage of being the cheapest out of 3 we already mentioned. The reason for this being the case can be found in its name. Shared hosting involves sharing your resources with other people and their websites, which are also hosted on the same server.

It is like living in a dormitory or just sharing an apartment with others. Imagine having to wait for other people in order to shower or someone else eating your precious food from the fridge without permission. The same applies to shared hosting – it is like a giant house where everyone shares everything including the rooms, the appliances and the food. However, instead of these things, the server has a processing unit – CPU, active memory – RAM and storage – HDD or SSD, which are essentially the so-called server resources. They get shared between all of the occupants of the server, which can have some negative effects.

When a website of another user happens to see a sudden increase in visitors, it will begin to consume a larger portion of the server’s resources. This can lead to other websites or applications being hosted on that server becoming resource-starved. As a result of this, they will become slower and take their time when responding to a user interaction. This can increase the website’s bounce rate as many visitors will simply click away due to this slow loading speed. Consequently, this can also result in a bad search engine performance as user experience is one of the most important page evaluation factors that can determine whether your given page will rank high or not.

Virtual private servers – an optimal solution

VPS servers are slightly more expensive in comparison to shared hosting, but they also solve a lot of the problems that shared hosting has. These servers use virtualization technology to create individual virtual machine instances, each with its own resources in spite of being hosted on the same server. To put this into a real-life scenario – it is like having your own flat in an apartment building. You have your own rooms, appliances and anything else, but you do have neighbors due to the fact that you are occupying the same building. Much better right?

Furthermore, with a VPS server you also have the ability to gain complete root access to your server, allowing you to make any changes that you would like. But the greatest advantage that these servers have is their ability to scale. But what do we mean by that? Well, in simple terms, you can either upgrade or downgrade your server in order to accommodate changes to your website and its traffic.

If you have more visitors, just purchase extra resources and if you do not, then simply remove them. This makes it quite the practical choice as you will not have to pay additional money for something that you are not using. Moreover, there are some providers that allow you to pay for such servers using Bitcoin. This service is commonly referred to as Bitcoin VPS and is quite useful as paying with crypto does protect your privacy and allow you to remain anonymous while making a purchase. Not only that, but international transactions are also much cheaper.

Dedicated servers – the ultimate type

Finally, there are the dedicated instances. This is the fastest, most powerful hosting option, but it is also the most expensive one. It is like owning the entire apartment building. If you have the financial ability, you should always go for a dedicated server, but this particular hosting type is usually utilized by large scale service providers, online retail and ecommerce businesses, making it very expensive for some smaller companies.

Overall, as we already mentioned, hosting is one of the most influential building blocks for your website ‘house’. Because of this, it is important to carefully choose your hosting provider and server type as it can have an impact on your performance. Go for the hosting option that will be most suitable for your website and business and the one that of course meets your budget – the different hosting alternatives are more applicable in some situations more than others.

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