VPS
I’m not sure I ever see the need for small business/entrepreneurs/one man shops to ever have more than shared web hosting for their website [not their web apps, or any custom developed web services] I just mean their information based website.
Here’s why…
- Shared hosting is managed, and you don’t want the overhead of having to manage your own server, let alone likely have the knowledge to, or the money to hire a server administrator. [if you can hire a server admin, well then get a private server, not a VPS]
- It’s more costly
- It’s not necessarily any faster, shared hosting provides unlimited disk space and bandwidth, and while the risk of one of your web hosting [neighbors] screwing up and taking your site down is plausible, the fact is, it’s uncommon, and typically resolved within 24 hours by your host
- It’s easier to ruin, and harder to update
- If you get a huge spike in traffic, it’s not necessarily any safer, you’d have to have pre-allocated enough resources using a VPS or dedicated server, or have content delivery networks setup, or it will crash also. [part of the reason I love WPEngine is that they are a shared hosting account, but utilize caching services, redundant content delivery networks, and a bunch of technology to handle scaling traffic] The fact here is that anything can crash with enough traffic, and if you’re regularly crashing because of traffic, a better shared host will serve you just as well if not better than upgrading to a VPS or dedicated server.
This is likely more a vent than anything else, it’s probably because I’ve worked with hundreds of sites, and not one of them, unless they had a dedicated mobile application, or custom solution with a large scale database [not something like Wordpress] needed a VPS and it urks me when people get tricked into thinking a VPS is some more capable version of shared hosting. The hosting waters are murky, still confuses the heck out of people.