Virtual Private Servers Compared to Shared Hosting

Most internet marketing websites nowadays are hosted on a shared hosting server account. A dedicated server is the best form of hosting on the market but it is still expensive for the average internet marketer -price starts around $40/month. A much cheaper alternative to dedicated server is a virtual private server -VPS. A dedicated server is dearer because all the costs of the hardware is only shared by one person compared with VPS where there can be 10 or more customers sharing the resources.

VPS is in fact a mix between a dedicated server and a shared hosting account. With a Virtual Private Server you still share system resources like the CPU and memory with other users. VPS acts like a dedicated server because the file system is set up in such a way that users cannot tell that the system is being shared. Each VPS can be rebooted independently and executes exactly like a dedicated server for its users and applications. It has it's own root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files. Virtual private server is much more powerful than the traditional shared system. VPS is more secure unlike shared server where one can actually figure whose site is hosted on the server. The major drawback of shared hosting is that, if one of the website goes down because of a bug in the system, there is a high probability that all other websites on shared hosting account will also go down. This will not happen on a Virtual Private Server since each websites are independent of each other.

There are limitations to having shared hosting services and the biggest one is you cannot usually compile or install any script or software. Many shared hosting company nowadays put limitations on number and frequency of cron jobs running. Some hosting companies have even banned popular script like RSS2Blog because shared hosting cannot cope with server resources needed for the software. Such limitations do not exist with VPS and dedicated servers - the users are in total control of the server.

Virtuozzo control panel, allows easy management of the virtual private server. You can reboot your server at one click.

A few years ago, Virtual private server used to be much more expensive than shared hosting. Nowadays you can even find VPS hosting cheaper than shared hosting. VPS hosting now starts as low as $12 per month.