VPS Or Shared Hosting When Building A WordPress Site?
From somewhat humble beginnings as a simple software tool to help people get started weblogging, WordPress has become the website tool of choice for many websites on the internet. In fact, it has become the most popular website backend on the internet, with a wealth of themes and plugins designed to transform it from a simple blog site to almost anything you require. WordPress’s flexibility has increased its appeal, and as a result, has gained popularity as more and more themes and plugins are developed.
WordPress Hosting
When it comes to WordPress hosting, there are a plethora of options available to you, from basic sites that set you up a blog on their own platform, to self-hosting using a shared hosting service, dedicated server, or VPS. While basic WordPress hosting can be a great way to get started with a basic blog, they can be limiting on the themes and plugins that you can use with your site.
Moving to shared hosting can give you some of that freedom as you host your own WordPress install, and can add your own choice of themes and plugins to really make the site your own. Shared hosting has its own disadvantages though. For a start, your website is sharing the server’s resources along with all the other websites on the server, and there can often be hundreds or thousands of websites on the server competing for the same resources. This can mean that should one or some of those other websites on the server prove popular, they may end up consuming a lot of resources, leaving little for your website.
Another issue with shared hosting is that as you aren’t in control of the server you’ll be limited as to what can be used on it. You may find some plugins have requirements for certain software or PHP extensions in order to work. When on a shared hosting environment you likely find that unless the software or extension is already installed on the server that the host won’t be willing to install it for you. A final note about shared hosting is that if you are planning on running an e-commerce site using your WordPress install, then it’s strongly recommended that you don’t use shared hosting at all, for security reasons.
VPS WordPress Hosting
With a VPS you gain a virtual server that’s only used by you, with its own resources reserved for it to use. This means that even if other VPSs sharing the same infrastructure are busy it won’t affect how your site will run. You also gain even more flexibility when compared to shared hosting as you are in control of the server and can choose who gets what access to it, as well as what software is installed on the server. The downside to a VPS is that it’s a bit more difficult to set up, although control panels such as Zpanel and Virtualmin can make this a lot easier at no extra cost.
VPS can be more expensive than shared hosting. However, our SSD VPS packages run for about the same cost as basic shared hosting packages. Our starter VPS packages work great for starting a WordPress site and provide the option of increasing the resources for the VPS as needed when the site increases in popularity. This is a much simpler task than migrating from a shared hosting platform to a VPS with minimal downtime to the site.
Overall, while a VPS may initially involve a little more work to get up and running, the advantages it presents outweigh those costs. Especially when in the long run you’ll probably end up needing a VPS as your site grows in popularity.