Nowadays, hosting providers offer a buffet of different hosting types. It can be overwhelming at times to understand each and every one of them along their functions, features and advantages to identify which of them work perfectly for your website. In this post, we will battle out 2 very popular hosting choices, Cloud Hosting and VPS Hosting. This post should help you understand where each of these hosting types stand in terms of flexibility, security, customization, cost etc.
Before we begin with the comparison, let’s first start with understanding each of these hosting types.
Cloud Hosting: Cloud Hosting is where the resources needed for hosting and running your website are divided and distributed across multiple servers. These multiple servers are clustered together to form a loud. All these servers come together to function as a single powerful server which is highly reliable and infinitely scalable. Both VPS Hosting and Cloud Hosting work on Virtualization which involves partitioning a physical server into a number of small, virtual servers with the help of software. Cloud Hosting leverages the power of virtualization better as it is essentially a network of virtual machines rather than a single virtual instance in a single server like in VPS. With this, hosting can become extremely responsive to business and website needs as you can create or shut down virtual servers at a click of a button.
VPS Hosting: Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting gives you your own partitioned server and allows high customization and configuration for your partition to make it exactly the way you want it. Although you share the main server with a number of other users, you have your own allocated resources. It’s a middle ground between Shared and Dedicated Hosting.
Now that we understand each of these two hosting types, let’s look at how they stack up against various parameters:
| Cloud Hosting | VPS Hosting | |
| Performance | Resource addition and removal is fairly simple so performance can be scaled. However, resources are ultimately shared so compared to VPS Hosting, performance is lower. | Nothing like not having to share resources. Once the VPS is configured as per the plan, your website will get the complete bandwidth to those resources, leading you to have comparatively better performance. |
| Customization | Because Cloud Hosting is usually distributed across a number of different servers, the average user has less control over their hosting parameters. | Owing to the fact that your partition on the VPS server is completely isolated, you have complete full root access to provide control over customization and configuration to build the environment you want. |
| Scalability | Scalability is the biggest advantage of Cloud Hosting. Owing to the overall architecture of the Cloud, resources can be added and removed instantaneously depending on the need of the site. | In VPS Hosting scalability is possible but not as fast as Cloud Hosting. As you are allotted resources based on your plan, you may have to request for additional resources in case of scale ups. |
| Security | As the resources are split across multiple servers, proper account isolation and security measures are needed for Cloud Hosting. | VPS Hosting offers some advantages in terms of security over cloud as all of your data is stored on one server as opposed to across a number of individual cloud nodes. |
| Reliability | All resources needed to host your website are split across multiple servers, there is no single point of failure, making it highly reliable. | Although VPS Hosting is also very reliable, website downtime can happen if the physical server on which your virtual instance resides falis. |
| Cost | Comparatively cheaper as the cost is divided. Moreover, you can also pay for what you use, and hence be in full control of your Hosting billing. Cloud Hosting Plans cost in the range of $10 to $20 per month. | With VPS Hosting, you pay for an allotted amount of resources on a monthly basis. As you are paying for exclusive resources, the price is comparatively higher. VPS Hosting Plans come in the range of $20 to $80 per month. |
In summary, VPS Hosting is right for websites with predictable traffic and those who want consistent and predictable billing statements. Cloud Hosting will make a lot of sense for websites desiring high resource availability with unpredictable traffic and resource usage. Hope this helps you get a better understanding and if you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to express the same in the comments section below!
