Most people will pick a host the way they would pick a theme, by looking at the screenshot on the landing page. With the VPS and VDS plans, the screenshot is a spec sheet, and the spec sheet is where the problems start.
Here we go, that’s where I start, and it’s the very opposite of what most hosting lists do.
There are literally loads of hosting options out there; you could go with any company on your behalf by just doing a bit of research into the reviews and the service they provide. I’d suggest you start off with their trial version, use that to test their service for your business, and then move your whole business over to that hosting. A lot of the hosting providers will never actually reveal the full extent of the limitations of their platform. There’s always going to be something hidden in the back end that they don’t actually show you on the front page.
That’s the main issue, really. I’m just giving you that bit of information so you can make the right choice of hosting for yourself. VPS and VDS are two types of hosting, and both of them are very good. For a large site with a lot of traffic, you should always go for a VDS as it gives you a guaranteed service. That said, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will cope with the traffic, and if you don’t optimize your site to deal with scrapers, etc then they can eat up a massive amount of resources. You need to be aware of that and have a number of different strategies in place for your domain.
That’s the short version. The rest of this piece goes into detail.
VPS, VDS, and the line between them
The two labels are used very loosely, and some providers will, in fact, be selling the same product under both names. Read the plan, not the name.
- VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a virtual machine running on a physical server that is shared with other customers. The amount of sharing varies from provider to provider, with resources potentially being partially shared or oversold. This means that performance can be impacted if one of the other users on the server gets busy. It’s the solution of choice for small business sites, blogs, etc.
- VDS: typically a VPS with reserved resources (dedicated CPU cores, guaranteed RAM, etc.). More expensive and by far the most predictable under load. Ideal for stores, busy publishers, and any site where a slow hour is a very expensive thing.
- Dedicated server: a whole physical machine. You don’t normally find yourself in that position until you’ve grown beyond a decent VDS.
Whichever label is on the plan, these are the attributes worth checking:
- CPU: dedicated cores or shared, and how many
- RAM: guaranteed or burstable
- Virtualization type: KVM generally isolates customers more strictly than container-based setups, where overselling is easier to hide
- Storage: SSD or NVMe, local or network-attached
- Bandwidth: port speed versus monthly transfer, and what “unlimited” means in the fair-use terms
- Price: the first-term rate versus the renewal rate
Size the server from your traffic, not the plan page
Cost-effectiveness is all about matching the plan to the site. A VDS that you don’t need is money being lost every month, and a VPS that’s too small will cost you your visitors at the most inopportune moment.
Start with what the site does today. Get the monthly pageviews, the peak concurrent visitors, and the average page weight from your analytics and a speed test.
A very rough figure would be pageviews x page weight. 50k pageviews at 2MB per page is about 100GB a month before you even get to the CDN taking the images off your server. A 1TB allowance on a plan like that is ten times what you actually need, so it’s not what you’re paying the extra for.
Memory is normally the first bottleneck on a WordPress server. Each PHP process (each worker) uses memory, and a plugin-laden site will use a lot of memory per request. Count your plugins before you count your visitors.
Arithmetic is the cheap half; the other half is what a live project does to it.
I’ve recently been working as a part-time developer building and maintaining WordPress sites and various other CMS’s. The first thing I do is look at the business’s traffic, work out what they need and what they require, and then work out how much bandwidth they actually need to be online. You simply cannot go online with a business without the right hosting. You should absolutely not believe a word of what they say in terms of the features they’re going to offer. I’m not going to name any particular hosting provider off the top of my head, but you should go straight to their dedicated customer support team and ask them the questions you have about what they’re showing you and what they’re actually going to provide. Is it really there?
Sometimes there are so many negatives and caveats that you have to be absolutely clear about those. You should never believe the reviews on the various sites. It’s better to go to Quora and the Reddit forums (the type of place where people actually post their own views). A few weeks ago, I was having a look around a number of forums, and there were a whole lot of people talking about HIP. Hosting in a community format with all the bells and whistles, and claiming to be the number one hosting provider on your site as a result of their super-fast servers and their best hosting. I told you myself that you should go to HIP.Host and do your own due diligence to check that the features they’re advertising are actually there. It’s really your decision; you need to be absolutely certain, and you need to do your own checking and verification before you go and pick a hosting company. There are times when the big names will go to market and build their brand on the back of their hosting. There are other times when there are loads of little companies out there that are actually providing a fantastic service, but they just don’t have the name recognition.
Treat the numbers as a first cut and re-measure after launch.
The myth that more servers fix everything
Myth: a VDS can cope with any traffic you throw at it. Reserved resources simply mean that no one else is using your share. It says nothing about your own site, and it will, in fact, be wasting it.
Scrapers and malicious bots consume as much CPU and bandwidth as legitimate visitors. Cache your pages and have a CDN or firewall in front of the server. Rate-limit the login pages and WordPress’s xmlrpc.php endpoint. Always check your raw access logs before you assume you’ve hit the limit of your plan. A robots.txt file is a request, not a lock, and abusive bots will just ignore it.
Another myth is that the reviews will tell you which host is any good. A lot of the review sites are, in fact, making money from your sign-up, so take that into account when you’re looking at them. I find the community threads on sites like Reddit and Quora a lot more useful as they have people actually describing the problems they’ve had. Be very careful with those too, as any review site can be gamed.
What a bad pre-sales answer sounds like
Just ask the company’s support team directly and ask in writing. A bad answer will be of the form “unlimited everything, you’ll be absolutely fine” with absolutely no numbers attached. A good answer will tell you how many dedicated cores you get, whether the RAM is guaranteed, what happens when you hit the transfer cap, what the throttling is, how long the refund window is, and what the plan is at renewal.
Keep the reply. If the live service is different, then you have a difference in the writing.
During a trial restore of a real copy of your site, run a load test and check the time to first byte at your peak hour. A host that doesn’t put their limits in writing has already answered your question.
One provider to run through the same questions
HIP Hosting. You can check HIP Hosting against the questions above in the same way as you would any other provider.
As for this hosting, there’s been quite a bit of discussion in the forums about it. I’m very pleased to have made the switch to a host that offers both affordable and reliable service. The pricing is absolutely straightforward as to what you’re getting. You could obviously go and do your own bit of research into the various hosting providers and see if it’s the one for you and whether it suits your requirements. If it does, it’s a very good option.
Treat every claim you read there (mine included) as something you absolutely have to check with their support team before you do anything.
Where I’d start
Start with a VPS unless your numbers tell you otherwise, and then progress to a VDS when your traffic (not your ambition) demands it.
For the novice, I’d actually recommend starting out on shared hosting. It’s ideal for finding out how it works under your own traffic and for testing, and it gives you the functionality and reliability that you need for your business. If you get a good provider, then you can go on for a longer period as it will meet your requirements.
Whichever one you pick, pay only for the headroom that you can actually measure.
