If your website seems slow and you’re on a shared hosting account, you might be thinking of upgrading to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated Server. Before you do that, consider what you already have on shared hosting.
I just finished an ecommerce site for a client. I developed the site on my shared hosting server and CS Cart, the shopping cart software we used, seemed to run just fine. Since this site has the potential to get a lot of traffic, we decided to go with a Virtual Private Server (VPS). According to the Hostgator agent we talked to, this would be much faster than a shared hosting account. To our surprise, after we migrated the site to the Hostgator VPS, we found the performance to be very slow, unacceptably slow. We contacted Hostgator support to determine if there was a problem that was causing the server to run so slow.
What we found out was that even with the fastest VPS package hostgator offers, the VPS server would not be as fast as shared hosting. Unfortunately, the Hostgator agent who recommend VPS for speed purposes, was completely incorrect. The main reason for getting a VPS is because you need the ability to configure a server exactly as you need it, something you CAN’T do on shared hosting.
frank says
This isn’t always true. Most likely hostgator was using inferior hardware on their vps servers. If you find a good vps provider like Accuwebhosting.com you will see a large speed increase using a vps server over shared hosting.
Vps servers share maybe 10 to 16 other websites per server and a shared server can hold hundreds of sites. The hardware on the vps you was using is to blame. Just because hostgators vps machines didn’t work for you doesn’t mean all vps machines are slow. I beg to differ.
Max says
Frank, yes but in reality. How many small websites on shared hosting get lots of traffic?
As soon as website gets serious most try to move to dedicated. Because to get lots of visitors to a new website you have to spend much time and money anyway.
So my theory is that shared hosting holds way more websites most of which are hardly alive. Unless of course hoster decides to add up more and more of them on a single server.
And most reputable hosters track websites on shared hosting that take too much resources due to “newsletters” “viruses” etc. and take measures.