Shared hosting or VPS? What are the differences?

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting is a server where the contracted resources (CPU, disk space, and memory) will be shared by the hosts who have access to it. Choosing this methodology is an option that will not have a very high cost compared to other services, but as a consequence, we must know that since all the server resources are shared, if the website has high traffic of simultaneous visits, its performance will drop significantly.

The fact that it is a popular and widely used service is because it offers us advantages when hosting websites that are not very demanding in terms of performance (such as small blogs or static business/informative websites), because, as we have mentioned, the economic cost is not very high, it does not require great technical experience since it will have a standard configuration and will not require much maintenance.

What is a VPS?

VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server) is a system where, like shared hosting, a physical server is used, but the resources will be partitioned virtually so that each user always has the resources available and thus does not saturate the web traffic, penalizing performance. Each of the users, with this system, will have a virtual "plot" (which the server itself will previously generate) where they will have full access to the resources associated with that partition and will not affect the performance of other users.

This methodology is used for website owners with medium traffic that exceeds the limits of shared hosting plans but still does not need the resources of a dedicated server.

The disadvantages of VPS hosting compared to shared hosting are that it requires technical experience, the price is significantly higher, but it provides us with scalability, more memory, and bandwidth.