Shared Hosting, or Cloud Hosting: Which Should You Do?

Introduction:

If you’re building a website for the first time, hosting is critical — and often confusing. Three of the most common methods are shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting and cloud hosting. Thankfully, extensive technical knowledge isn’t a requirement to get up to speed with these hosting techniques.

Choosing the best fit for your website depends on a number of factors including performance demands, security requirements, cost constraints, scalability requirements, and server administration preferences.

Shared Hosting

With a shared hosting approach the website server and its resources, including bandwidth and storage, are shared with all other hosted sites. Typically, a website owner won’t know who or which websites will be sharing the hosting platform with them.

Each customer on the platform has a server resource limit determined by the hosting platform’s package. While many shared hosting providers have multiple packages with differing resource access levels, all customers ultimately occupy the same space.

Think of shared hosting as renting an apartment with roommates: You have one room within the larger apartment space. Access to key resources, such as the kitchen, bathroom and living room — is shared among all residents.

Shared hosting is the most common method of hosting because it’s the most affordable, but does come with potential drawbacks. If server resources aren’t robust enough to handle multiple users or if security controls are lacking, your website may be slow to load, difficult to access and potentially at risk of compromise.

Cloud Hosting

A cloud server is essentially a virtual server that runs in a cloud computing environment. It’s built, hosted, and delivered through a cloud computing platform accessed remotely via the Internet.

Here, you’re renting out the entire apartment building. There are other buildings on the same block using power and water resources from the city, but there’s no physical connection.

Cloud servers give website owners a sense of stability and security because any possible software is isolated from your website environment. Any other cloud server won’t have an impact on your cloud server, and your cloud server won’t have an effect on any other servers. With physical servers, an overload from another user could possibly have an effect on your site.

This speaks to the primary benefit of cloud hosting: Reliability. The distributed nature of cloud deployments means that even if one server goes down, others can quickly take over. Cloud servers also offer a level of scalability not found in other options.

If you’re looking to grow your website and want your server to accommodate these changes in server power, a cloud server allows you to add memory and processing power as needed. With a physical server, that sort of growth requires purchasing pricy new hardware to keep up with the site’s growth.

But this doesn’t mean cloud hosting is without potential problems. It’s the most expensive hosting option and without a clear plan for website deployment and optimization you may find yourself using — and paying for — more resources than you need.

With the basics covered, let’s dive into a more detailed comparison of these hosting types.

We’ll start by speaking to some of the key similarities and differences between shared hosting and VPS deployments.

Is cloud hosting faster than shared hosting?

Cloud hosting is significantly faster than shared hosting thanks to a different hosting model: Virtual servers replace physical stacks, making it possible for providers to optimize speed and performance.

While cloud and shared hosting both leverage a shared pool of resources, those in the cloud aren’t tied to specific physical hardware — instead, they can be scaled up on-demand.

Is cloud or shared hosting more secure?

Cloud hosting is more secure — so long as you implement the right security controls. While cloud solutions typically include basic security tools, customization at scale is left up to individual web hosts. The better your best practices, the better your security in the cloud.

Are cloud or shared hosting solutions more expensive?

Shared hosting solutions are cheaper than cloud options. While costs are scalable in the cloud — the more you use, the more you pay — they outpace basic shared options.

Web Hosting Provider Examples

Considering the move to a new hosting provider? Some standout options include: