In this video I explain what hosting is and the differences between Dedicated Virtual Hosting (VPS) and Shared Hosting.
Video: What is Hosting? Dedicated Virtual vs. Shared Hosting – Graticle Design
Video Transcription
Hi, my name’s Shawn and I’m with Graticle. We’re a web design company.
Today I want to go over what web hosting is, and the difference between Shared and Dedicated Virtual Hosting.
What is hosting?
Every website consists of many files that need to be served to the user when they arrive at your website. There are many different types of hosting, but we offer two: Shared and Dedicated Virtual Hosting.
When we first started, we only offered Shared Hosting. It basically came down to it being cheap and affordable for our clients. As time went on we started experiences hiccups, so we decided to research other hosting solutions that we could provide for our clients. We then started offering Dedicated Virtual Hosting.
Most hosting that you see advertised is called Shared Hosting. It’s super cheap, they say that it has 99.999% up-time, and everyone seems to offer this low cost hosting solution. This is great for someone that is just starting, but if you want to have a reliable website, it’s just not going to cut it.
The PRO to Shared hosting is that it’s extremely cheap (does the saying “you get what you pay for..” come to mind?)
The CONS are that it’s slow and not very reliable. Like I said, this may cut it for someone just starting out, but after you get your feet beneath you, you should immediately look for other solutions.
How does Shared Hosting work?
Shared hosting works by hosting thousands of websites. All of these websites share the same software while residing on the same server. For example, if your shared hosting company allots a certain amount of memory to you, you have to stay within that limit. If you do go over that amount of memory, it not only affects YOUR website performance, but also EVERY website on that server.
From our experience, this is a common theme while on shared hosting: You noticed that your website is kind of slow, so you call your website hosting company and let them know that it’s running slow (or unresponsive). They say that they’ll look into it, open up a ticket, and they’ll “be in touch.” Sometimes this can take a few days. They’ll come back and let you know that they found a website that was exceeding their quota on the server, and they’ve since disabled their website, so your website is now good to go. Not for the last few days unfortunately.
In most cases, this is the situation. The company is not proactively seeking out servers that are running slow and over quota. You have to do this yourself. Sometimes this can take weeks for you to even notice that your website is slow. That’s not a very reliable way to run a website much alone, a business.
The service that we recommend to all of our clients now is Dedicated Virtual Hosting.
The PRO’s here are:
+ Extremely quick
+ Stable
+ Reliable
+ True 99.999% up-time
Dedicated Virtual Hosting is literally online 99.999%. With shared hosting this number is more like 75%.
You might look at that and say to yourself “You know, 75%, that’s not too bad.” The problem is that 25% of the time people are unable to view your website. They can’t even get to it.
Not only are they unable to view your website, if they stumble upon it again, they’re not going to click, because they’ll remember last time they clicked the website it was completely unresponsive. If you’ve got an important client going to your website at any point in the day, you need it to be online and reliable. When someone clicks on something you want it to actually respond and not drag on.
The only real CON to Dedicated Virtual Hosting is that it costs more. And like most things in life, if it’s good, it’s going to cost more.
For a test between these two hosting solutions, we setup Graticle.com on our Dedicated Virtual Hosting, and then setup Graticle.net on our Shared Hosting.
Here is the result of our test:
Notice the load time difference between the two. Graticle.com loaded at 668ms, while Graticle.net loaded at 2.79s (3x as fast!)
This may be another one of those things you try to justify. Three seconds? I mean, does that really make a difference?
But when you’re searching around on the internet, you’re using websites like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. These companies have some infrastructure and their servers are quick. You start getting used to this quickness, so you start expecting it from other websites that you visit. Once you navigate away from these major players and land on a website, 3 seconds starts to feel like an eternity.
If you’d like more information, you should read our blog post: Hosting is Not Created Equal: Shared vs. Dedicated Virtual Hosting.
You can also read more about our Dedicated Virtual Hosting Services
If you’d like to take your website more seriously, we can move your website to Dedicated Virtual Hosting and you can start seeing results like you’ve seen here.
Give us a call at (360) 450-3711 and find out how you can get your website hosted with Graticle.
