The Web Hosting Show

If you need high performance web hosting, the choice you have these days is between dedicated hosting and VPS hosting.  So, which one is a better value?  Which hosting plan type with give you the most bang for your buck?  Well, for the most part – it will come down to your basic hosting needs.  More and more people are turning to these two hosting plan types as their own website grow in popularity so let me break down the basics of why one of these hosting plan types might be better than the other.

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So which one of these two web hosting plans gives you the best value?

VPS Hosting Value

VPS is an acronym for virtual private server.  I won’t go too deep into the dictionary definition, but in a nutshell this type of hosting plan is a virtual machine setup on a server.  A web host can run a series of VPS accounts all from the same server (as they do with shared hosting) however, VPS hosting gives you more server resources to work with (such as RAM and CPU power).  If you are just running a series of websites and have no idea how to be a server administrator – VPS is the best upgrade you can make.  You can get the power of a dedicated server environment at a significantly cheaper price.  The drawback with VPS hosting is that you might not be able to do some advanced server side configurations.

Dedicated Hosting Value

A dedicated server or dedicated hosting plan would be you renting an entire server to do the work you need to have done.  Unless you get it fully managed (which will be costly) you will be responsible for keeping all the server side things like the control panel, PHP, MySQL and other things of that nature all updated yourself. If you know how to do all that, this isn’t a problem.  Your average guy on the street might have no clue how to do this so this is already the first drawback for the service.  The advantage to dedicated hosting is that you get to set things up however you see fit.  The window of customization is fully open for you to tweak and configure things to fit your needs.

Overall, I think most people will find that VPS hosting offers more value than a dedicated server hosting package. The one thing it comes down to for me is that you can get the best of both shared hosting and dedicated hosting all wrapped into one package.  You can get the server side things totally managed by the web host, as you would with shared hosting.  VPS hosting also offers you more RAM and CPU usage, which is necessary for any popular website of any type. If you have another opinion though, feel free to share them in the comments.  Would love to hear a viewpoint from the other side of the fence.

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© Mitch Keeler 2011 | Check out my firefox help site and my tech blog too!