Dedicated server: A dedicated server is a physical server installed with your choice of operating system and, if necessary, the applications you’ll need (e.g. IIS, SQL Server, and Exchange). You choose the server specs when you sign up. This includes CPU, disk space, and memory, all of which can be upgraded or downgraded (requires the server to be powered down). Importantly, with a dedicated server you enjoy complete privacy and control over the server.
Virtual Private Server (VPS): Dedicated servers can be powerful machines – sometimes too powerful for all those valuable resources to be used efficiently. This is an old problem in the computing world, which is why virtual private servers (VPSs) were created.
With the use of virtualisation software on your dedicated server, you can create multiple VPSs, each running a different workload. Each VPS can have its own operating system and operate isolated from the host system and other VPSs. The number of VPSs you can run at the same time depends on how much of the available resources of your dedicated server has been allocated to a virtual machine.
Cloud server: A cloud is created by pooling the resources of different physical servers together. When a cloud server is created with virtualisation software, a portion of these resources are assigned to the cloud server.
Much like a VPS, a cloud server is isolated from the host system and other cloud servers. It can also run its own operating system. But, compared to dedicated servers, cloud servers have two distinct advantages:
- Cloud server resources can be scaled up or down on-demand. The physical servers hosting the cloud server do not have to be powered down.
- Where a dedicated server may experience downtime when a hardware component fails, cloud servers won’t go offline when a drive fails or an entire server goes offline
Shared hosting: Shared hosting is often regarded as an entry hosting tier. This is a physical server or cloud server divided up among ‘tenants’ which share the server’s resources. Hence the name.
Shared hosting comes with a fixed amount of computing resources (CPU, disk space, and memory), and you’ll have to share the server’s IP address with other sites on that server. Hosts will typically provide access to a control panel interface from which the hosting account can be managed.
Shared hosting is a good option for starter sites and personal blogs that won’t need much in terms of resources or custom software components.
