FAQ topic: Hosting types

With a shared hosting plan, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Hybrid server you are sharing a part of a large cloud cluster server or a physical server in various sizes of partition. Whenever a server or cloud is shared amongst several users, its resources, such as processing power, RAM memory and disk space, are distributed amongst those tenants as needed. By sharing these physical resources, the cost of providing the server to you is shared and so you get a lower-cost server, the lower the cost, the more the resources are divided.

A Dedicated server, though, is exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a whole physical server that is dedicated to a single tenant. You have access to use all of the resources available to that server, you aren’t sharing them with other unknown tenants and you can use the server as you wish, with your own applications. 

The Dedicated server is suitable for important mission-critical objectives, applications with high-performance requirements and key websites with high traffic levels, as well as applications that require significant levels of security.

Our Dedicated servers offer you the flexibility to use every last ounce of resources for your own purposes, from behind our firewall. The server comes with either Linux or Windows operating systems and we can install either a Plesk or cPanel licence at additional cost.

A Hybrid server is a large dedicated server divided into smaller chunks using the same virtualisation technology that is used to divide our cloud servers into VPS parcels. In fact, a Hybrid is similar to a VPS in some ways but the Hybrid is split into fewer, larger partitions giving performance close to that of a dedicated server but at a lower cost because you are sharing hardware resources, as in a VPS.

The main differences between our Hybrid server and our VPS are:

• Hybrid servers are split into larger partitions, meaning you have much more space available;
• Because there are fewer Hybrid partitions per server, you get a larger share of available resources than in a VPS;
• Our Hybrid servers offer greater flexibility and configuration than a VPS.

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is derived from using virtualisation technology to divide a larger server into smaller virtual servers, each behaving as if it was a dedicated private server remaining isolated from the other virtual servers around it. A VPS is the next step from a shared hosting plan, providing the privacy and flexibility of a Dedicated or Hybrid server but still with shared resources that make this an affordable option.

Rather than splitting individual servers for our VPS plans, we use large cloud clusters with fast and reliable architecture that provides flexibility and robust performance. Our standard VPS has 1 core CPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB HDD disk space and a Plesk licence included. Other options are available, such as increasing CPU cores, RAM memory, disk space or changing to cPanel or Webmin. You can also change from a hard disk (HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD). The options you choose may affect the cost of the service, contact us for prices.

Shared hosting refers to when you rent space on a server with other clients and share the resources provided by that server, or cluster of servers. Connections to the server, bandwidth, processors and RAM are all shared between the clients and their websites on the server and, as these are finite resources, they are allocated intelligently between the accounts as necessary to meet the demands on the server. This means that you have access to server space and the benefits it offers at a greatly reduced cost but ultimately, your use of server resources will be in competition with every other website allocated space on the shared server; this is the downside of having server access for reduced cost.

Other options include a Virtual Private Server (VPS), which is a virtual machine running its own copy of an operating system on which you have your own instance; a Hybrid server, which is a shared resource like a VPS but with fewer sections and therefore more space and resources allocated to each participant; or a Dedicated server, where you rent a complete server and all of its resources.