Shared Hosting vs Cloud Hosting

[saiefmahmud]

Shared hosting
What it means is that you’ll share all your resources with each other, such as data, CPU time, memory and disk space. If you are lucky (99% you are), you should be fine with that. However, there are some rare cases when someone is using a lot of resources and thus your site speed will go down a bit. If that’s happens, it’s usually wise to get in touch with your web hosting support and tell them your problem.

Cloud hosting
Now, VPS is very different. This one’s more like owning a condo. So you’re still sharing and playing nice with the others in your place, but you’re responsible for what happens and keeping everything patched up.
There’s a lot less sharing because there’s less people, and you have separate allowances each. The CPU time and memory are still shared by everyone, but you also have a chunk of both of those allotted just to you.

 

[ughosting]

Shared hosting
What it means is that you’ll share all your resources with each other, such as data, CPU time, memory and disk space. If you are lucky (99% you are), you should be fine with that. However, there are some rare cases when someone is using a lot of resources and thus your site speed will go down a bit. If that happens, it’s usually wise to get in touch with your web hosting support and tell them your problem.

This is not the case if your host is using CloudLinux. If they are running CloudLinux then each user is in a "container" like an OpenVZ VPS, which has its own CPU, Memory, I/O, IOPs, DiskSpace, Inode and Bandwidth Limits. In fact it could be argued that CloudLinux has more control over its users than OpenVZ, Xen or KVM has over each of its VMs.

Cloud hosting
Now, VPS is very different. This one’s more like owning a condo. So you’re still sharing and playing nice with the others in your place, but you’re responsible for what happens and keeping everything patched up.
There’s a lot less sharing because there’s less people, and you have separate allowances each. The CPU time and memory are still shared by everyone, but you also have a chunk of both of those allotted just to you.

The problem here is that many VPS providers use a "fair share" CPU policy. Which means that all of the CPU power is shared between VMs. Now, this is good news as if you have say 4 VMs, 3 with 20 domains and the 4th with 2000 domains, the domains on the 3 20 Domain machines (if CPU was in contention and the domains had an equal load) would run 100 times faster than domains on the 4th machine. (I'm assuming for the sake of the CPU argument that the memory is sufficient to run all domains). That's because the CPU is shared equally amongst the VMs first and then equally amongst the processes on each machine (not the domains).
The issue here is that cheaper hosts often have too fewer CPUs for the number of VMs.
Also, since I/O can be abused, one VM can seriously impacts on others.

Now, this basically means that you may find yourself with the same problem in VPS land as you do in Shared Hosting world when it comes to slow sites.
Plus you have to do all of the system admin but for possibly zero performance gain.

If, however, your host had CloudLinux and sold you an account with the resources you needed, i.e. more CPUs and I/O than usual shared hosting, accidental or deliberate abuse would be impossible as I/O is one of those things controlled.
Backups and Restores could be done through the control panel.
The host would keep all of the patching up to date.
This type of hosting is called an "Elastic-Site", as you can upgrade your CPU and I/O resources along with your DiskSpace and Bandwidth, and downgrade it if you no longer need the power.

Now many small hosts don't have the infrastructure to offer multiple CPUs, but if your host doesn't have the equivalent of CloudLinux, you'd better find another host, as sooner or later you will most likely have performance issues.

 

[ughosting]

Forgot to add...

CloudLinux, comes with the tools to determine who or what is using all of the resources, both in Apache and MySQL. It takes us under a minute to understand where our resources are going now, not somethings we could have acheived before CloudLinux, and again if you host doesn't have the same tools, how long will it take them to react.

Now it may seem that I'm a total CloudLinux Advocate, and that's right. I remember how much effort it required to keep normal customers, who knew no better under control. It's rare now that my guys need to manually intervene, but when we have to, it doesn't take long.

Make sure your host has these tools. The more time they are firefighting, the less time they have to support you!

 

[24x7server]

Hi,

More and more shared hosting providers use CloudLinux and this takes the shared hosting a step forward towards keeping the isolation, so others are not hampered with any single account's deed.. CloudLinux gives a virtual limit to account just like it has its dedicated resources that he cannot cross..

 

[Artashes]

This thread is closed because the OP has taken someone else's content and posted it as his own. Normally, I would delete it as well, but ughosting has contributed a great reply, so it'd feel terrible about killing that effort.

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