Many websites quickly outgrow traditional shared hosting, where multiple customers share a single server with relatively limited isolation between customers. At this point, website owners have two options: moving to a virtual private server (VPS) or to a dedicated server.
Dedicated hosting essentially means that your business or project has its own physical machine all to itself. Companies using VPS options, on the other hand, get a share of dedicated server. A single dedicated machine can be virtualized into multiple virtual machines (VMs). Virtualization software as hypervisor strictly protects you from your neighbours (to a much greater extent than shared hosting) but resources like the CPU, memory (RAM), and SSD are still shared.
Security: No one else will have access to your server. While this means that you are responsible for your own backups, it gives you the strongest control over every resource. You have control of your own firewall settings and security-related hardware configuration. Not even a hypervisor exploit can allow another party to compromise your server.
Hardware: Having a dedicated server means you have complete control over upgrades or downgrades. You can customize your server by adding RAM, getting additional hard disks or swapping the GPU. It all depends on your server platform. It’s worth knowing that the processor usually cannot be upgraded.
Performance: As mentioned before, you get the full power of your very own server. With a VPS, a DDoS attack on a neighbour’s server might slow yours down as well. With a dedicated server, this is not possible. Also, you can be sure you are not sharing space with a malicious website or spammer. Plus, it is less likely that your server will crash.
Whether you’re starting your own hosting provider or simply want to run multiple applications in completely isolated environments, virtualizing your dedicated server is a common task. Popular virtualization software includes VMware, Hyper-V, ESXi, Oracle VM and vSphere. By ordering dedicated server, you must get a gateway IP range and assign a unique IP address for each virtual machine. As a result, many small servers can run within a larger dedicated server. Each VPS runs its own operating system (OS) independent of the others, creating the illusion that it is its own independent server.
How to choose between VPS and Dedicated server?
VPSs are for those who have outgrown shared web hosting. They are a middle solution between shared hosting and dedicated servers. As your website is growing, you can move to a VPS, especially when it is more cost efficient and cheaper. VPSs range in monthly price from 1 USD to about 100 USD, while dedicated servers start at around 100 USD and can skyrocket in price.
A dedicated server is a solution for large websites or projects that require large volumes of traffic or extreme performance. The ability to use custom hardware solutions are a point in favour of choosing a dedicated server, since it might be difficult to find an appropriate VPS with a GPU or NVMe disks.
