To know the benefits of virtual hosting, we first need to understand the difference between the 3 different hosting plans that are; Shared hosting, Dedicated hosting, and virtual hosting.
Shared Hosting:
Shared Hosting is much like living in an apartment, where everyone lives in the same place, and all the resources are consumed by all the residents, such as electricity, parking, and play area. You cannot customize anything at all, but you have to share all the maintenance cost and responsibility with your every neighbor. In shared hosting every account (resident) must share all available resources with other accounts present on the same server (building), the resources may include CPU time, disk space and memory.
Dedicated Hosting:
Dedicated Hosting isn’t like shared hosting at all; it is like owning a house all by yourself, where you are the sole person in charge. You can use all the resources in any way and as much as you want. You can customize any part of the house without asking anyone, as you are the person in charge. No one else interferes in the matters of your house and they no one can tap into your resources as well. In the Dedicated Server, you have the entire server all to yourself where you can use up all the disk space, the ram and the CPU time according to your liking. Dedicated servers are best for people with greater needs.
Virtual Hosting:
Virtual Hosting lies somewhere in between. When shared hosting is like living in an apartment, and dedicated hosting is like owning a house to yourself, virtual hosting is like residing in a half-plex/simplex or a condo. Where you can customize everything to your liking, but you still have the share few things of the property you own, you are responsible for making repairs and maintaining your property.
Fewer residents are living on the property in comparison to an apartment and the resources like building area, and parking are allocated to every resident individually that are not shared by everyone. In virtual hosting resources like memory and CPU time are shared equally across all accounts on the server, but at the same time, equal portions of these resources are dedicated to every account individually. This allows for more flexibility and greater power than being on a standard shared server.
People who are small-timers in the online business and have a limited amount of traffic then the shared hosting service is best for you, but people who have made a name for themselves in e-commerce and are now growing in this field, then the virtual hosting service is best for them. Which isn’t that expensive as dedicated hosting service and provides with all the resources that are required for a growing website.
While dedicated services are only for the giants in the online business who receive insane traffic which is mostly international, they need much space, high speed and high upload page time. All of this is possible with dedicated resources which also provide 24/7 assistance as the dedicated service providers assign operators to look after your website for hardware and software support.
Dedicated hosting and virtual hosting are different in many ways, but there is a myth that needs to be addressed, that shared hosting and virtual hosting are pretty much the same thing, this is obviously not true. While there are many similarities in both hosting services, there are also some significant differences which draw a line between both hosting plans.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHARED AND VIRTUAL HOSTING.
Security:
Safety is the primary concern for any organization, and when a customer subscribes to a shared hosting plan then he knows it will be less secure while Virtual hosting provides much more security than Shared hosting.
Platform:
in shared hosting, there is a basic level of compartmentalization and file system while Virtual hosting has platforms like Xen Linux Virtualization and OpenVZ.
Resources:
in shared hosting the customer will have access to a limited number of resources, while in virtual hosting there is access to private disk spaces resulting in greater resource availability.
So you’ve understood the major differences in all 3 hosting services (shared, dedicated, virtual). You can quickly decide which suits you the best, but if you are already subscribed to a shared hosting plan and want to upgrade, then you need to keep a few things in check which are mentioned below.
- You feel to have more control over things.
- Your site is consuming all the processors.
- You feel like you should customize the settings and the appearance.
- You want the existing performance level to expand.
- Your website is consuming all the CPU and RAM resources.
- You are planning to send more emails.
- You want stability and excellent performance.
- You feel like it’s the time to rise above all the rest.
If you come across any of the scenarios mentioned above, then there is a valid reason for you to change your hosting service.
BENEFITS OF VIRTUAL HOSTING SERVICES
A virtual hosting service comes along with many benefits that can help in bringing your website to the next level, some significant benefits are.
1. Energy saving.
The biggest benefit of virtual hosting is that it is energy efficient. Electricity is expensive which is needed to run web servers but thanks to virtual hosting, companies can now save money on electricity bills. The process of energy saving can simply be stated that the virtualization of real physical servers into virtual servers results in a massive number of some reduced physical servers which results in less space in the data center for storage and less cooling costs, and of course a significantly reduced electricity bill overall. All of these factors might correspond to significant savings if they are conducted every month.
2. Increased operating rates.
99.9% is the operating rate of any good server. Virtual servers have the tendency of maintaining an operating rate as stable like this; it may be higher depending on the circumstances. The maintenance of servers is possible when the servers are in the state of migration during working time. You just need to do is to transfer the application on another system. This avoids interruptions in the operations of the server, which makes it the best advantage of the virtual hosting service.
3. Cost.
Cost is by far a major advantage, as in comparison to dedicated servers, the price of virtual hosting is much less, and almost everyone can afford it. The price is justified for all its benefits.
4. Reduced Server Deployment Time.
Virtual servers have rapid deployment time which is very useful for data transfer. TBs of data can be sent instantly without any disruption, and all customers and end users love a website which is fast.
5. Performance.
The performance of virtual servers are much greater than shared servers but less than dedicated serves as in dedicated servers the customer owns all the resources, but in virtual servers, many resources are allotted equally to all the users, the users are also very less compared to the shared server. Avoiding the case of a bad neighborhood.
Conclusion.
In my opinion, virtual hosting services is best for people who have planted their feet in the online market and are now trying to expand their business and to rise above the rest, for that they need to deploy the virtual hosting service which can move their website to new heights. Don’t worry of the price as there are many cheap virtual server providers out there than you can subscribe to.
Content provided by Robert John, marketing manager of inxy.host