There are many good reasons to upgrade to a VPS hosting account. In this article, we will focus on the main advantages of VPS hosting over shared hosting.

You are probably on a shared hosting plan at the moment so first let’s see the advantages and the disadvantages of a shared hosting.

Shared hosting

Advantages of shared hosting

1. The first advantage of a shared hosting is that it is cheap. Your shared hosting account is maybe very cheap. This is a good reason to remain with a shared hosting but it is not the best one. As with everything in life, you get what you pay for. A shared hosting account is ideal if you are expecting a low visitor count. When you are first starting up with your business website, then it’s likely that you are not going to receive many visitors. But nobody wants to be in this situation for a long while. There is no real point in spending time and good money creating a website if your expectation for your visitor numbers is low.

2. The second advantage is shared hosting – no maintenance. This is a good feature. Most small business owners do not have the time or the technical skills to maintain a web server. The good news is that you can have the same arrangement with a VPS Server.

3. Another advantage of shared hosting is ease-of-use. Anybody to kids to senior citizens can use shared hosting with a little bit of training. Using cPanel is easy and intuitive.

4. Disk space upgrades. With a shared hosting, it is a fairly easy process to acquire more disk space if you need it. if your website is growing and you need this space, you can contact your hosting company and the process will be straightforward.

So, all in all, a shared hosting is a good startup option that makes a lot of sense for beginners and for those folks who want to start their own blog or hobby website. But for a business, it makes good sense in the beginning. However, most businesses quickly outgrow the shared hosting.

Now let’s see which the downsides of a shared hosting are:

1. Shared resources. With shared hosting, you share the webserver with many other websites. The resources of the server such as CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth are all shared. This means that you are likely to meet with some severe growth limits. Let’s face it. you want your website to grow and be profitable. It is likely that you want to add more and more content to your website such as articles, tutorials, multimedia, etc. to keep your potential customers informed of the latest developments.

2. Limitations. With shared hosting, you are going to experience limitations and you can even have your account suspended for exceeding resource usage.

3. No control. With a hosting account, you have to obey the hosting company’s rules and regulations. For example, if you want to run programs on your account that eat up server resources, then you probably won’t be able to do that. No such limitations are set in case of a VPS or a DDS.

4. The next important disadvantage is low security. Although the main server usually has the lasted security patches installed, with a hosting account if a hacker wants to take control over your website, then they can do it. There are limits that can be provided with shared hosting accounts and security breaches do happen from time to time.

5. Another disadvantage is that you will show up in an email blacklist. If any other user of the shared hosting violated any email rules, then the whole server can be blacklisted, with that meaning that your entire website can be tarnished without even knowing it. This is a common problem and google knows about these blacklists and can affect your search engine rankings as well.

What is a VPS?

Many folks have heard of VPS but few understand what it really is. The first thing to understand is that you get a virtual machine. With VPS, a server is divided up into different parts and software is installed on these parts to make a number of virtual machines. So basically, it is a server within a server. If you make an analogy with your computer, you may have a C:\ drive and a D:\ drive. These are independent of each other but share the same hard drive.

VPS servers have their own resources. The main resources of the server such as the CPU, the memory, the HDD, etc. are all divided up and each VPS has its own dedicated server resources that none of the other VPS accounts can use. These are dedicated to your website.

On a VPS you can own install your own software. You can install your own operating system and web components without any interference from your hosting company. You can have your engineer set up your website exactly as you want it to be.

On the same subject, you can also provide your own script installs. There are many useful scripts that you can run on your VPS such as e-mail scripts, special plugins, and a whole lot more.

With VPS hosting, you have built-in growth capacity. You have the server resources at your disposal so you can grow your website and your business according to your own needs. You want to be in total account of your business, and this is not totally possible with a shared hosting.

VPS accounts usually come with a managed option. With such an option, the hosting provider would take care of your server monitoring and important issues such as security updates and patching. If you do not have the time or the technical expertise to look after your own server, then such a feature is going to be great for you.

Now that you know what a VPS is, let’s consider some of the advantages of a VPS hosting.

1. Stand alone. You don’t share the resources with anyone else. There is no action of others penalising your website’s performance or you ending up on a black list. This is because you are provided with guaranteed resources. No other VPS on the main server will ever use your resources. You will be able to sleep well at night, knowing that your website will be available 24/7 and there are no other server users that can affect you.

2. Full control. You are in a full control of your online business.

3. VPS server will also improve your website performance. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential visitor. They have found out about your website and are eager to see what you have to offer. You are on a shared hosting and the server resources are at a bursting point and your website loads very slowly for the visitor. they decide to give up and go elsewhere. With a VPS account, there is not need for you to worry. Your site will load quickly and always be available to your visitors and potential customers.

3. More traffic to your business website. Increasing the amount of website traffic your receive should be a priority for you. You want your website to be busy and working for you all of the time. With large traffic increases and traffic spikes at rush hours, you are going to potentially face a problem with a shared hosting. There are not such issues with a VPS hosting.

4. Security. With your own VPS server, you will be able to install custom firewalls such as CSF, that have very strict rules and are almost impossible to break. This is not possible with shared hosting. If you are running databases with sensitive data, then this is a paramount condition.

Why you need to upgrade to VPS

Here we are going to discuss the best reasons why you need to upgrade your shared hosting to VPS today.

1. Business growth. Do you want your business to grow? Of course, you do! You probably have a plan for this and it should include the growth of your website. With a VPS hosting account, there are no restrictions on growing your website to match your business growth plans.

2. Be in control. Business owners like to control their destiny and you are not any different. With shared hosting, you are not in control as far as your website is concerned. Get back in control with a VPS hosting upgrade today!

3. Site performance. A slow website is a real problem and a totally unavailable website is a real disaster. If the website is slow, then you are likely to loose visitors who could become customers. Also, Google takes a very dim view of slow websites and never ranks them well. None of these issues with VPS hosting!

4. No other users. There are no others to spoil the party. You will not have to fight for resources with them again and your site will not be slow or unavailable.

5. Site security. How would you feel if your website was hacked and sensitive information leaked online or copied or, worse, still removed form your website? It can happen! Particularly with shared hosting. With a VPS upgrade, you can have the very best firewall software installed to prevent this from happening.