We get a lot of questions regarding hosting options!  The variety of choices can often be somewhat overwhelming for businesses large and small.

Is a shared solution  adequate for your needs, or could you be compromising valuable data?  What exactly is a virtual private server (VPS)?  Does my growing business dictate a more secure solution? I’m fairly certain our business needs a dedicated server or more, but should we just buy our own?

With that in mind, we’ve developed a brief article that discusses and compares the advantages of three popular hosting options in a simple, straightforward way:  shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting, the phrase most of us are familiar with, is an excellent solution for small websites. It’s an inexpensive option and has all the basics an individual or very small business might require.  In essence, you are sharing a single server and common operating system with many other users, meaning you and they are subject to common restrictions, potential downtime, etc.  Think of it like a folder on your current desktop or laptop. As your needs grow, particularly in a business or ecommerce environment, you may find that this hosting option lacks the robust security and flexibility features you require.

Virtual Servers (VPS)

As your website or internal requirements grow, virtual private servers can offer dramatically increased security, flexibility and cost savings. It’s similar to having your own in-house web server, minus the hassles of hardware costs, IT, maintenance and upgrade costs.  A virtual server shares a single server but is completely isolated to protect valuable internal documents, ecommerce solutions, other applications and web data. You can install anything you like with security permissions you choose. In VPS hosting, each primary server is segregated into various private servers, with each having its own resources and operating system to act as an entire server. Overall, the advantages of VPS hosting can are affordability, guaranteed resources, full control, and better performance with increased security & reliability.

Dedicated Servers

Importantly a dedicated server provides you with total control minus the hardware costs, maintenance, internal IT costs.   Your webmaster and/or your hosting provider can customize the server to your exact business requirements.  This might include back-end enterprise solutions, specialized e-commerce applications, increased security and many other custom or preferred applications your business requires.  Automated software license renewals, custom backups and hosting IT support are very real and measurable benefits.

All very nice, you might say, but what about the cost?  Almost universally, studies show it is far more cost effective to “lease” a dedicated server or servers than to maintain the effort internally.  Just as your business offers particular and unique expertise to your customers – reputable hosting companies employ the technical and physical assets required to provide the best technical and physical support for you, their customer.

 We Can Help

If you are still unsure about your current options or requirements, we’ll help you make an honest assessment of your best options.  We host and/or develop solutions from simple shared hosting environments to complex Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – to high demand, high security enterprise solutions, cloud, content delivery networking (CDN) Software as a Service (SaaS) and more.

A skilled development team is always at your service for custom web applications or websites.  We are also currently a Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) provider.  Please browse our website, call us (866-345-8322 -toll-free) or contact us, anytime – no obligation ever.