Choosing the best plan for your current situation can be tough, especially if you have no experience in web hosting. The most common types of hosting services you will see hosting providers advertise are as follows:

• Shared Hosting
• VPS/Cloud Hosting
• Dedicated Server Hosting

Each one of them has its benefits and downsides, and in this article, we will go over all of them. Hopefully, this can give you more insight and make your choice easier when considering a hosting plan.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting plans are perhaps the most available ones out there. The concept of shared hosting can be compared to an apartment building. If the entire building is a fully-fledged Dedicated Server or a VPS cloud - the shared hosting server is merely a flat inside. It is limited in terms of resources, such as disk space, memory, and CPU availability the same way an apartment is limited in terms of the square meters it offers. You should not be unsettled by the name "shared hosting" as it does have its benefits. Let's go over them:

• Shared hosting is very affordable. It is excellent if you are starting your business, as you will not need to spend a lot of funds to get started. It is also great if you have an existing website which you are still working on and it does not have many visitors. Such types of sites include personal websites, blogs, portfolios, or small shopping carts.
• Shared hosting services are typically fully managed hosting solutions. This fact means that you will not need to perform any maintenance, updates, or configurations on the server environment as there are already people who handle this for you. This way, you can direct all your efforts and attention towards building your site and expanding your online presence.
• Shared hosting servers are scalable, meaning you have options when choosing them, and you can upgrade your resources if needed. For a startup business, you would typically start with the smallest available plan and move yourself up on the ladder when you need the extra means to grow. If you already have an active site that is receiving visitors, you can choose a middle-of-the-pack type solution or go with the best possible one, depending on what it offers.

Let's go over some downsides now:

• The performance of your website and your user experience could suffer due to abusive users. Unfortunately, no matter how evenly distributed the resources on the server are, there will always be someone that overuses. In this case, you may feel spikes in the performance of your service. Typically system administrators tend to resolve this issue quickly, but for some people, these interruptions are very tedious and make shared hosting very off-putting.
• You have a cap on the amount of resources you can use. Imagine this situation - you have a small e-commerce site, and your popularity is increasing, drawing more and more people to your site. You see, an opportunity where running an ad campaign can significantly boost your revenue, and you immediately go for it. Your website, however, is hosted on a shared server, and this spike in visitors starts affecting your performance due to your hosting account's capabilities. The degraded performance of your website increases the bounce rate of your visitors and will likely reduce the likelihood of them ever coming back.
• Shared plans are typically very restrictive in regards to server configurations and are locked into a specific setup/configuration. You will have minimal access, and if you want to perform upgrades or installation of a particular service you need - you will not be able to do so. If you want more control over the environment, then you should consider a VPS cloud or a Dedicated Server.

We at HostArmada have put a lot of effort into tailoring a set of Shared Hosting solutions that can sate the needs of anyone looking to start an online endeavor or want to find his existing websites a new home where they can thrive. Please be sure to check them out here. If any questions arise, please feel free to poke our sales team over the live chat option on our website.

VPS cloud hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. Let's try to apply the concept of shared hosting to VPS as well. If the shared hosting plan can be conceived as a flat inside the apartment building, then a VPS can be considered as a whole floor. In technical terms, a potent physical server is split into several logically interdental virtual machines. Each machine typically has its own kernel and dedicated resources, which are distributed via computer software known as a hypervisor. Let's go over the benefits of the VPS cloud hosting plans:

• VPS plans have dedicated resources, meaning that everything that is listed in terms of resources you have absolute control over 100% of the time. These types of solutions are great for running an already established business, getting regular visits, and sustains a lot of users. It is also excellent for running multiple websites at once.
• VPS plans are typically very scalable in all terms - CPU, Memory, and Disk Size. Usually, VPS servers are part of a cloud server network, meaning can upgrade whenever you need to, and you will most likely be able to scale it up infinitely.
• VPS plans are very flexible in terms of their setup. At HostArmada, as we offer root access on demand for all our clients owning this type of service. In addition to that, we will be able to perform any installation or service configuration, as long as the Operating System(CentOS 7) supports it.
• If the VPS is a part of the cloud server network - it has an immense level of stability.

Here are the downsides:

• Depending on the virtualization used, the "dedicated resources" may not be so dedicated. Initially, when VPS solutions started gaining popularity, they were all using a para-virtualization tech called OpenVZ. This type of virtualization means that the VPS node shares ONE kernel and that the resource distribution is done on an "on-demand basis". An example will be if an individual container needs a lot of memory. The kernel will immediately relocate all of the available RAM there, leaving the rest of the VPS containers with nothing if they needed it. We at HostArmada have implemented a full-virtualization tech on our infrastructure, called KVM. This type of virtualization makes it, so each VPS inside the node has its OWN kernel and its OWN resources allotment.
• Most of the service providers out there offer semi-managed servers, meaning that you will most likely need to perform configurations and upgrades on your own. Luckily for you, we at HostArmada offer fully managed VPS hosting solutions, which means that you can leave all the server-related tweaks to us.

If you have questions in regards to our VPS solutions, please feel free to contact our sales team over the live chat on our website.

Dedicated Server hosting

This type of service is the top-notch hosting solution. It should be considered when you are dealing with an enterprise-level website as it offers the highest available performance. In this case, the physical machine is entirely dedicated to the owner, and you will not have to share anything with anyone. If you purchase such a plan and we apply the earlier concept, this would mean that you are now the sole owner of an entire apartment building! Let's go over the upsides of a Dedicated Server solution:

• Exclusive dedicated physical resources. Whatever is listed in the plan's description -you get it, and you can use 100% out of it.
• Reliability is the outcome of exclusivity. You can count on peak performance and stability when using this type of solution.
• Lack of virtualization. You can be sure that there won't be anyone using your resources, and you have access to them whenever needed.
• Configuration choice. You can do configure the server as you please or as per your application's needs. Root level access is provided on-demand for all our clients owning a Dedicated Server. In addition to that, we will be able to perform any installation or service configuration, as long as the Operating System(CentOS 7) supports it.

Here are the downsides:

• Price is perhaps the most off-putting factor when it comes to this type of solution. Owning it comes at a high cost, and if you are not mindful, it can break the bank.
• Despite crashes being rare, if it happens, it could take a while before the server is up and running, resulting in a substation downtime.
• Upgrading your server's resources will likely require you to shut it down so they can be applied. While this is also the case with the VPS cloud server, the transition there is seamless as the hypervisor controls the process. With a dedicated server, this is performed by a person and is much slower. It also leaves room for human error, which can cause a loss on top of the already expensive server.

We offer these types of solutions, along with Dedicated CPU Servers, which provide an almost identical level of performance and stability as their bare metal counterparts. You can check our solutions here, and if any questions arise, feel free to contact our sales team over the live chat.