I remember having to make a huge decision about my websites a few years ago. I was using a shared hosting account that supports multiple domain names to host a number of my blogs and websites.
The service was great, but the performance of a shared hosting service could no longer keep up with the traffic I was generating. Naturally, there were two options I could consider: a larger reseller hosting package or a virtual private server (VPS). I had no experience in running a server of my own at the time, so setting up a VPS hosting was a daunting task nonetheless. Fast forward a few years, and I now have several VPS hosting accounts running and supporting hundreds of WordPress blogs and websites without a glitch. If you are in the position I was in a few years ago, these next few tips will help you get started.
Reseller Hosting Vs VPS Hosting
Reseller hosting is great for hosting a large number of sites, but you still don’t have the full control offered by VPS hosting. The performance level of reseller hosting is also higher than the standard shared hosting services; again, you can squeeze more performance out of VPS hosting in most cases.
You can also go into several levels of VPS, such as managed/unmanaged/fully managed, like the options found here, which can be a godsend if you’d like more than your average WHM interface! So, which one should you go for? Based on my experience, VPS is still the better choice for several good reasons. First of all, there are managed VPS hosting services to choose from. Managed VPS allows you to have experienced server administrators set up and maintain the VPS while you focus on the more important matter: managing your websites.
They are more expensive than unmanaged VPS services, but you get so much more performance-wise. VPS is also much more scalable than reseller hosting. Similar to shared hosting, you can only upgrade a reseller hosting account so much before you hit the hosting company’s limits. With VPS, you can always add more processor cores, RAM and disk space at any point in time. You can even reduce the size of your VPS hosting to save money if you don’t need the extra resources. Lastly, even unmanaged VPS is not so difficult to manage now that there are a lot of tutorials, resources and pre-made server images to use.
This brings me to my next point….