Shared Hosting for Small Businesses

There are three main types of web servers that you can can choose when deciding where to put your website.  They are Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), and Dedicated Servers.  Dedicated Servers are by far the most expensive and resource intensive option.  Not only does it contain the software, but it also involves the actual hardware the website is using.  the maintenance and support required is extremely expensive.  This all but rules it out for most places except the largest businesses, with high traffic loads, and a large it staff.  

VPS’s offer many of the performance advantages for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated server, it creates a virtual server, with virtualized resources.  it sits on a dedicated server, and uses a portion of the resources to dedicate to running the webserver.  the benefit of VPS’s over shared hosting is the resources are always available and reserved for the VPS.  Shared hosting only guarantees storage space, not cpu or memory.  with VPS’s it opens to door to customized infrastructure and scaling architectures.  Service providers like aws and digital ocean provide support to create pretty amazing environments for large complex websites, and web applications.

The drawback to using a VPS is that it still is more time consuming and more complex than shared hosting.  if you aren’t comfortable with using command line in linux, and playing with things like apache or nginx setting up your own VPS can be daunting.  If you simply have a small website and don’t want to spend a few hundred dollars a month in support, shared hosting is for you.  shared hosting is typically done through cpanel or similar platform like Plesk.  At CHS Tech Solutions we have a dedicated server running cpanel.  

Cpanel simplifies management of a website, while having some limitations; if your website has less than a thousand visitors a day and uses a platform like wordpress or joomla that isn’t a resource hog, cpanel is more than adequate for the task.  Cpanel handles dns, email, websites, and even web storage options.  it has a robust toolset that keeps infrastructure expenditure to a minimum.  it’s rare that you would spend more than an hour a month on infrastructure, most of the monthly website budget can be spent on updating your  website, making improvements that will drive customers to your door.  
 

To find out more about our hosting options check it out here