With advancements in technology and the popularity of the World Wide Web, more and more people are making use of the internet for a variety of purposes. If we take a look at the most popular uses of the internet, we see ‘Shopping’ is one category that has been growing rapidly.
Seeing the opportunity, every business is trying to make a shift from offline to online today. If you’re among them and want to make a strong online presence for your business, Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform that can help you do that. This is one of the great eCommerce software available today but will work best only when you will choose the best hosting for Magento.
An eCommerce website is not the same as your general blog or website. As you will be selling your products and services via it, and a number of people will be visiting it, it is crucial that you give your Magento website a robust hosting environment.
With an eCommerce site, you will require more disk storage, bandwidth limit, security solutions, and support. Therefore, you shouldn’t undervalue the need for a good hosting service.
When it comes to hosting solution for a Magento website, we notice most people often get confused between shared and dedicated server.
Are you one of those? If yes, you have landed in the right place. In our today’s post, we are going to compare these two hosting options so that you can better decide which option is going to work better for your website.
But before that, let’s find out what exactly these two hosting types are.
Shared Hosting
As the name indicates, shared hosting allows multiple users to utilize a single server. In this type of hosting, you have no idea what websites you are sharing the resources of a server with. Every user has a limit on the total amount of server resources they can use. And it is defined by a hosting plan a user chooses.
Since you share server resources and their cost too, Shared hosting is the most economical option for budget-conscious webmasters.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting gives you the option to have your own physical server to run your website or web application. With most dedicated hosting plans, you get full access to server resources such as disk space, memory, CPU, etc. In short, dedicated hosting lets you relish all the administrator’s control over the server and its resources.
We hope now you have basic understating of both hosting services. Now, let’s compare them and find out which is going suit the requirements of a Magento-based website perfectly.
Shared Vs. Dedicated Server Comparison
#1. Cost
Everyone needs a fast and well-secured server. However, the biggest question is can everyone afford its cost? Well, dedicated hosting is almost 10 to 15 times more expensive than a shared hosting.
Anywhere you can get a basic shared hosting plan between $2 to $5 every month. On the contrary, with a dedicated hosting service, you will have to pay somewhere around $20 to $100/mo.
#2. Server Resources and Management
As we said above, an eCommerce website is more advanced than a general information website you will need to have more control over server resources and software updates.
Therefore, you should go for a hosting service that gives you better server resources and control over the management.
In dedicated hosting, you get a better control over your server resources. You can adjust them instantly according to your website’s requirements.
Talking about shared hosting, it is a cost-effective way to get your Magento-based eCommerce website live. With a good shared hosting provider, you get access to a control panel. From where you can manage some of the basic requirements of your site. For example, databases, server logs, website folders and files, and databases.
However, it lacks the custom configuration options that we see in a dedicated hosting.
#3. Scalability
The craze for online shopping is on the rise. Today, everyone is interested in buying things online. And for that reason, there is a huge competition in this market. In order to stay in the competition and grab users’ attention, every business needs a quick-loading website. Scalability feature plays a big role in it.
In this competitive market, it is necessary that your store is able to handle a sudden spike in traffic.
Scalability is one of the most attractive features of a dedicated server. When you opt for a reliable provider, your website gets the ability to handle more traffic, data storage, and transaction processing.
There are many dedicated hosting providers that offer automated scalability, which means you don’t need to do anything manually to increase the power of online store. Though most eCommerce platforms are well-adaptable with automated scalability feature, you shouldn’t forget checking it in advance.
Talking about the scalability option in shared hosting, we find it is limited to disk space and database size only. However, there is no dearth of shared hosting providers that offer unlimited file storage, email accounts and databases for a slightly higher monthly fee. But it is also true at the same time that the expansion of resources will be limited by the shared hosting environment as you will be sharing resources with hundreds of other users.
#4. Security
Though Magento is one of the most secured e-commerce platforms available today, there is always room for more improvement. Well, your hosting service can play a big role in keeping your Magento store safe and secure from all sorts of potentially harmful environments.
Whenever we talk about the most secure hosting service, dedicated hosting is the service that comes to the mind first. Out of 3 main hosting varieties i.e. shared, virtual and dedicated hosting, it is considered the better in terms of security.
Most of the dedicated hosting plans offer DDoS protection, Malware scanning/removal, SSL, networking monitoring, IP address blocking and many other server-level security features.
The one main reason why dedicated hosting is more secure than any other types of hosting service is you don’t share your server with any other users. Therefore, security holes in another customer’s site do not cause any issue for your site.
Sadly, the security level in shared hosting is quite inferior comparatively. Though most shared hosting providers will ensure that your site is secure and some of them may also provide you with a lot of security features, a website running in a shared environment is always under a threat.
In shared hosting, you rent a small piece of a hard disk (from a big physical server) and you are responsible for maintaining your own website and control panel. It means you can’t do anything to prevent issue coming from another user available on the server.
There are many reliable shared hosting providers that offer 99.9% uptime guarantee, but sometimes issues caused by other users may drop uptime percentage to a great extent.
#5. Performance
It is necessary that your hosting service is capable of handling the increased traffic, which you are definitely going to experience with the growth of your online store.
When it comes to dedicated hosting, you have plenty of options to enhance the performance of your online store to a great extent. For example, you can choose SSD storage over HDD and go for any of the operating systems such as Windows, CentOs, Debian that you think will work better for your website’s growth.
In the simplest words, in dedicated hosting, server performance is highly customizable. So if you need that extra horsepower, you can go for the dedicated hosting service.
In shared hosting, performance can’t be customized at the machine level. Since you don’t have many options to increase the performance of your server, with a basic shared hosting plan you may encounter slow website loading issue sometimes.
There is a world of difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting when we talk about performance options and features.
#6. Easy of Use
No matter what hosting type you have chosen for your Magento site, it will require some sort of maintenance to work effectively. It means you must have some technical skills to monitor your site occasionally. The maintenance tasks may range from checking for technical glitches to preventing data corruption to set up the security measures.
Although dedicated hosting is considered more secure and provides better performance, it may get a little bit tricky for newbies to maintain it. Usually, we see most businesses hire a technical expert to keep watch over their eStore in dedicated hosting.
This is the section, where shared hosting has an upper hand. Anyone who has basic technical knowledge can manage shared hosting server single-handedly.
Final Words
Considering everything together, we can say shared hosting is an inexpensive option and easy to get started with. However, you may have to compromise on performance and security. On the other hand, a dedicated server brings a lot of flexibility and power, but also comes with responsibility.
We would suggest you go for hosting service according to your store’s requirements, your budget, and technical understanding.
