subject: The Death Of Shared Hosting, And The Rise Of Vps... [print this page] We are all familiar with web hosting, nowadays it is as common of a business expense as paper or coffee. But something has changed over the last 5 years. In times past, most small business web hosting was considered shared hosting. The reason why is your ISP would have a few web servers, and each web server would have many customers on it - as many as 100. This type of shared web hosting is affordable, with a target price of around $5-$10 a month. Shared web hosting is easy to maintain from the ISP side, and can quickly provision service. There a few limitations though.
Problems with Shared Hosting
With a shared platform you are locked into a specific configuration. Development tools like Perl or PHP may be a specific version, and you can't have that changed just for you because it effects the whole server. There are also security issues. One customer's web application may have a security hole that when compromised can make your data vulnerable. Then there are maintenance windows, if the ISP decides to do maintenance, your down.
Welcome to the New World of Server Virtualization!
The last 2 years have been a buzz around virtualization - the partitioning of a single physical server into separate virtual servers. The amazing thing is virtual servers or VPS has become so affordable that an entry level VPS package is almost the same cost as shared web hosting. A VPS hosting solution is exactly like having your own private physical web server. This means you can install any version of your development tools or any custom applications. Because its your server, you have control over your data and nobody else can impact that security. VPS can also be cloned, so your server can be imaged for backup. In the event of data loss, you can re-image the server and be back up and running in minutes.
If your business model requires a reliable web site with limited downtime, you should strongly consider migrating to a VPS hosting system for your web services.
