Startups often make the mistake of getting hosting without really studying it. It’s easy to hand the job over to an expert, but if you aren’t savvy enough, you won’t know which hosting options are truly the best for your business now and in the future. If you’re just getting started, you must choose an option that will grow with your business seamlessly without being too expensive or bloated for your current needs. If you’re rapidly expanding and you’re afraid that your current solution might not be the most efficient or cost-effective, you need to consider better options. Let’s take a look at a few hosting options and see which ones are better in terms of scalability.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is by far the worst type of hosting that you can get if you plan to grow. As its name suggests, shared hosting is when you share a server with multiple other websites. These websites can have zero or millions of visitors per month. And this is where things get bad.
The host will not allocate the same bandwidth to all websites. It’s the site that gets the most visits that will get the most of it. This means that traffic to your site might start to load much more slowly, if it gets loaded at all. And that’s a big problem.
You don’t want service to your website to be interrupted or inconsistent as you might lose sales, but you may also get penalised by search engines as they use site speed as an indicator when calculating their rankings. So, do yourself a favor and at least look for a slightly higher-priced dedicated option.
VPS Hosting
If we were to recommend one hosting option for a startup that has a modest budget and is intending to scale but is not 100% sure where they’ll be one, five, or ten years from now, then it would be VPS, or virtual private server, hosting.
VPS hosting is similar to shared hosting in that you will be sharing the same server, but you will have a dedicated connection, which means that your site connection will not be affected by others. It is not exactly the same as dedicated hosting, and you need to understand dedicated vs VPS hosting key differences since they have different benefits and limitations. You also don’t want to sign up for a VPS service thinking that you’re getting dedicated hosting and paying dedicated hosting prices for it.
The only thing with VPS hosting is that there will be a cap on how much you can use at a certain point, and if your business gets extremely successful, the VPS hosting might become insufficient. There are also limits as to how much you can configure a VPS server which could be an issue if you want to implement different cloud and admin solutions later on.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is when you have a private server stored in another location that is for you and you only. This means that it will not be connected to other websites in any way. This also means that you’ll get pretty much all the benefits of having your very own server.
You’ll usually have more freedom with configuration. You also will be able to get more servers if you need more capacity. You have the peace of mind of knowing that your servers are professionally protected too.
Physical Servers
Then you have the option of having your own servers, but that is an option that we don’t recommend at all. There is not much point in doing this, especially when considering how vulnerable the servers can be. Anyone could come and physically destroy the servers or even steal them either for the hardware or information. Then there are things like overheating, power surges, and acts of God. So, think twice about this unless you have the means to protect your servers and your field requires it.
Now that you know a bit more about hosting options, you’ll be able to make a better decision for your business. Hosting plays an essential role for many businesses, so learn as much as you can about it and don’t hesitate to ask for a second opinion before choosing a solution.
