There are presently lots of hosting solutions for eCommerce stores tailored to serve each and every business need. The hosting market of today provides a sea of features for any type of website, from a simple blog to an enterprise-level eCommerce store. For online retailers, choosing a host for their sites is an important step in building their business online. We never insist on selecting our cloud hosting solution when customers come to us. However, it happens quite often, when online merchants approach us with a quote to help them build an online marketplace, forgetting about the top priority – hosting their website. After multiple trials to finetune all the settings by themselves, managing their platforms through cPanel, spending money on a cheap hosting solution, they ask us for help to arrange all the server issues to avoid downtime or increase load speed. In this post, we examine types of hosting solutions, compare some popular hosting ready-made packages for e-tailers, and announce a soon release of a new type of hosting service with us.
Types of hosting
Internet hosting falls into four types: shared hosting, dedicated server, virtual private servers (VPS), and cloud hosting. Let’s recall what are they by definition.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting means you share resources of a server with different users. You don’t have your own resources, only a part of them. And whatever you do, you won’t be able to increase the performance because of these resource limits.
Dedicated server
Dedicated servers have their own resources and, usually, a connection channel. Having a dedicated server is pretty expensive. You will need to pay for the server itself, for the traffic. It is a more complex solution, you will need to hire an administrator or a team of IT specialists.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Virtual private server is a section of a physical server pertaining to your project. Other websites may reside within its assigned section. Each VPS Hosting acts independently of one another and has its own dedicated resources. VPS users can install their own operating system and software, update it, and make any changes to the environment. VPS is less expensive than a Dedicated server but more expensive than a Shared server.
Cloud hosting
“Cloud” means that multiple servers are joined together to provide better and faster performance by completing and ensuring each other. You are switched between the servers depending on the load. This is the most balanced and sustainable hosting type.
It is also a flexible, scalable, and stable solution. The technology allows all resources like storage, RAM, CPU, transmission and etc. scale quickly up and down with no limit.
What hosting type to choose?
The hosting type you choose provides a different quality of the services, different amounts of resources, and different scalability capabilities. Considering this, shared hosting is the worst choice for the business, because you cannot control the performance level of the website and the authority of the IP. Consider VPS, Dedicated, or Cloud hosting types for business.
What is better: Cloud Hosting or VPS?
VPS and Cloud hosting solutions are the preferable ones as they allow scaling your project. Both are powerful in terms of server capacity, and secure. We won’t speak here about the Dedicated hosting as it might be an expensive solution for a majority of projects. Instead, let us focus on VPS and Cloud types and determine pros and cons of the two.
Pros of VPS vs Cloud
- As affordable as the Cloud hosting: you pay for what you need.
- As secure as Cloud. The only difference is that in case of VPS, a host partitions the server resources to dedicate a part for your project and separate you from other customers.
- Fast: As soon as you don’t exceed the allocated resources, you benefit from a high performance.
- Root server access: it allows you to customize your hosting environment and have full control over your space.
Cons of VPS vs Cloud
- Scalability: VPS allows your project to grow over time, but you will need to purchase a higher plan to unlock more opportunities.
- Some hosting providers can oversell their servers neglecting peak traffic events happening to a site that shares a common space.
- Opting for an unmanaged VPS, you may face difficulties with server configuration which leads to an increased time to get your project up and running.
Read more about VPS vs Cloud here.
Does my eCommerce business need VPS or Cloud?
If you’re striving to launch your eCommerce project within the shortest possible time and don’t care about scale, go for a VPS. It is an affordable and secure option for established businesses.
However, if you need a flexible hosting setup with the ability to scale up and down at no time then it’s worth considering a Cloud hosting environment.
VPS Hosting by Simtech Development: How is it different from Cloud?
As we’re counting down the days until we’re ready to announce a release date for VPS service, let us open a veil of secrecy behind our VPS solution and tell you more about what you will find under the hood and how our VPS is different from our Cloud hosting solution.
VPS and Cloud hosting solutions provided by Simtech Development team are both great for online stores and marketplaces. The level of service is the same. You feel safe as the security issues are with us no matter what kind of hosting you’re using. We work under SLA and are committed to providing you with the best service quality possible.
However, the two services are different by nature:
- The key difference between Cloud and VPS types lies in scalability. When you are in our Cloud, you are free to scale resources up and down any time on the fly upon request. VPS is harder to scale when you outgrow your capabilities.
- On the other hand, our VPS hosting solution offers a more powerful physical server than in Cloud, with initially bigger storage space per project right from the Basic plan.
- You get your private Virtual Server from us which is totally yours. We manage, optimize and tweak the software for maximum performance. In fact, with our VPS service you get a virtual server which is pretty similar to the dedicated one (but cheaper): you have full control over it, you can even reboot it.
- VPS lacks some benefits of the Cloud solution such as assigning extra server resources for cache and databases and an instant storage space increase to cater to traffic spikes.
Opting for a VPS solution, online store owners should consider that:
- VPS Hosting servers are more “powerful“ than the Cloud Hosting ones.
- However, scaling up and down is possible with the switching to a higher/lower hosting plan. It also implies some downtime while your project is migrated.
- In traffic spikes, there won’t be an opportunity to increase the storage capacity within the purchased plan. You will have to:
- Switch to a higher hosting plan and go through the migration process.
- Migrate to Cloud Hosting.
- With VPS Hosting the storage capacity per project is bigger than for Cloud Hosting. SSD volume depends on a plan, but on average it is three times bigger than the same on Cloud. Isn’t it a good variant for a robust start?
- If you need to increase the storage space, you will have to send a separate request to allot more storage space for your project.
So, if you agree to have an almost dedicated VPS solution, don’t expect high traffic and database growth right away, our VPS is what you need.
Key takeaways:
- VPS is much better than the Shared and Dedicated options as it is the golden mean between the two in terms of price and quality.
- Our VPS solution is as secure as our Cloud solution as we strictly follow our SLA.
- VPS is simple as it is managed by us meaning a hassle-free hosting for you. All the server issues are resolved by us in your favour.
- It is the appropriate choice of businesses that want to host a full-fledged eCommerce website with the established inventory.
Independently of your choice, hosting with Simtech Development, you get a full package of services:
- The hosting itself and the support of your project at all stages by a competent team with extensive experience;
- 24/7 monitoring and incident response at any time of the day or night according to SLA.
- Study of project bottlenecks to provide tips for optimization;
- Monitoring of the project security, traffic analysis and all measures to identify and prevent incidents threatening the website security;
- Embedded CI / CD processes to automate deployment, implemented DevOps techniques to increase the stability of projects;
- Unlimited number of requests and messages you can send to us to specify the server issues (if not an issue with us, we will advise you a better course of action);
- You do not need to keep a team of highly-paid specialists for server administration, automation and monitoring. Our solution is cheaper than in-house staff.
Closing
Any hosting solution by SimtechDev is a complete solution. You can release yourself from technical issues of optimization and server configuration, but do your business. When each professional is busy with his own business: a manager – with solving business problems, and a hosting provider – with servers, then each side reaches great heights, and everyone wins.
We are not just hosting, but a full-fledged business solution that removes the headache with technical hosting issues from business owners and leaves time for creativity and growth.