VPS Vs Dedicated Server: Which One Should You Buy?
VPS Vs Dedicated Server: If the number of your website visitors has recently increased to a great extent, you’re most likely thinking of changing your present shared hosting plan. Perhaps you’ve heard that in this situation, businesses either choose VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting.
But do you know which of these high-performing hosting options will work best to meet your particular requirements? To figure this out, you need to understand the differences between a virtual server and a dedicated server.
To help you out, we’ve prepared this article on VPS vs. dedicated server explaining all the major differences between them. However, before we start discussing the differences, let’s take a quick look at the basics of both these servers.
What’s A VPS?
In a VPS (virtual private server) hosting environment, you get to use resources such as bandwidth and RAM up to a certain limit. If you use up all the resources that have been allocated to you, you may be able to borrow additional resources from other users on the server if they haven’t maxed out.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| More secured hosting options | More expensive |
| Extremely fast and powerfull | Only virtualized server access |
| Scalable and flexible | |
| Ideal for big/data heavy websites & businesses |
What’s A Dedicated Server?
Here, the entire server is allocated to your site. You can choose the resource limits according to your requirements and get almost total control over them. However, there’s one highly important thing you need to remember when opting for a dedicated server hosting solution.
That is, either you need to choose a managed dedicated server plan or have a solid technical understanding of managing one yourself. This is because when you’re the sole user of an unmanaged dedicated server, the responsibility of maintaining it and keeping it secure largely comes down to you.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Full access to hardware resources | More expensive |
| Upgradable hardware | Requires technical knowledge for unmanaged packages |
| High performance | |
| High level of security | |
| Room for scalability |
Key Differences between Virtual Server and Dedicated Server
Here, we’ve outlined five major differentiating factors that you need to consider when deciding on VPS vs. dedicated server.
| Features | Virtual Server | Dedicated Server |
|---|---|---|
| Resource allocation | Some portions of its resources allocated | Use all of its resources |
| Performance | Slightly less than dedicated server | High performance than virtual server |
| Configurability and customizability | Flexible | Flexible |
| Security | Secured | Highly secured |
| Cost | Less costly than dedicated server | High price than VPS server |
1. Resource allocation
This is perhaps the most vital difference between a virtual server and a dedicated server. When you use an SSD VPS server, some portions of its resources are dedicated solely to your site. On the contrary, with a dedicated server, your site gets to use all of its resources.
2. Performance
As you’ve probably assumed, even a cheap managed dedicated server will come with greater resource limits than a VPS. Since the performance of your site directly depends on the resources it gets to use, the greater the volume of resources, the better performance it’ll deliver.
A VPS will help your site achieve great performance levels. However, as the entire server isn’t dedicated to your site, its performance may slightly reduce when other sites on the server have spikes in traffic.
3. Configurability and customizability
Again this is another aspect where a dedicated server may prove to be more useful than a VPS. When using a dedicated server, you can do almost anything you want to within its resource limits. Though you get root access with a VPS, and hence, can go for custom configuration, you may never get the freedom offered by a dedicated server.
In a VPS, as the resources of the server get shared between multiple sites, you won’t be allowed to install something that may potentially endanger the security of the server or its other users.
4. Cost
The cost of the hosting servers plans is certainly one of the prime decisive factors when we talk about VPS vs. dedicated server. Since a dedicated server lets you use all its resources, its cost will be significantly higher than that of a VPS.
Even if you choose a high-end, managed VPS plan with more resources, you can rest assured of paying lesser than opting for a cheap dedicated server.
5. Security
Both are highly secure options, but if you want to pinpoint the difference between a virtual server and a dedicated server, the latter is slightly less vulnerable to security threats than the former. As there’re other websites on the server in a VPS environment, if one of them experiences a security breach, your site may run the risk of getting affected by it.
Security issues can also happen anytime with a dedicated server, but you won’t have to suffer from other sites’ security breaches. Therefore, if you want to get more security, it’ll be wise to choose dedicated server hosting.
VPS Vs Dedicated Server: Taking the Final Call
As you can see, while there’re notable differences between VPS and dedicated server, they’re ideal for different segments of users with different requirements. Among all the differences we discussed above, resources and cost are two major factors to consider when deciding on VPS vs. dedicated server.
This is because you may be able to match the performance level of a dedicated server by choosing a top-tier VPS hosting plan from a leading hosting provider. So, take your time to outline your specific requirements clearly, and then see which of these options will be the best to help meet your objectives.
