Igor P.
Shared Hosting vs Cloud Hosting | Why You Should Care
If you use a photography WordPress theme by Flothemes, you need a hosting solution. Period. Hosting is where you’ll store your website and serve it to your web visitors. It impacts your site’s performance, security and loading speed – thus, the experience users have with your brand online.
Since there’s a multitude of hosting providers available out there, each offering enticing plans and benefits – you need to understand which features are crucial and how to choose the best option.
Today we’ll explore the different types of hosting and explain why we think that a cloud solution is the best investment in your business.
Types of hosting solutions
First things first, let’s review the different types of hosting solutions available out there. Here are the most common ones:
Shared hosting
This is one of the most popular solutions among website owners.
Why? Because it’s cheaper, relatively easy to set up and maintain, and you don’t need to have advanced technical knowledge to use it. Most providers offer easy (or one-click) WordPress installation options, taking care of the updates and security for you.
However, the disadvantage of shared hosting is limited performance. This is because your website is stored on a shared server and it shares the resources with lots of other websites.
Even so, you can still get a decent performance score if you optimize your WordPress site for speed.
Recommended provider: Siteground
VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting
VPS hosting is similar to shared hosting, since it still serves multiple websites that use a shared server. The difference is that you get more flexibility and security than with shared hosting, and your resources are guaranteed.
With VPS you can scale your hosting in case your website needs more resources and you also get some extra security compared to shared hosting.
Recommended provider: Siteground
Dedicated hosting
With dedicated hosting you get a dedicated server where you can store and serve your website. You have full control over your server and can customize it as you wish. You also have full access to your resources, as your server is isolated and you don’t share resources with other websites.
This solution is great for websites in need of higher levels of security, reliability and performance. Usually, dedicated hosting is used among high traffic websites or e-commerce stores.
Recommended provider: WP Engine
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting is a relatively new type of hosting, which became very popular over the past few years. The main idea behind cloud hosting is the following: your website is hosted across a network of connected cloud servers. Unlike dedicated hosting, cloud hosting can use resources from different cloud servers to serve your website.
Cloud hosting offers a very high level of reliability, flexibility and performance. You can easily scale up or down your resources and deliver fast loading times.
Recommended provider: Flywheel
Cloud hosting performance example
We’ve tested our Pronto theme core with Flywheel hosting, to explore how it performs out of the box, without the use of any extra optimization tools.
Here is the setup we used:
- The results are based on Pronto, hosted on Flywheel, check out the site here
- We didn’t use any 3rd party speed optimization plugins
- In GTmetrix, the results are based on test servers located in Vancouver, Canada.
As you can see, cloud hosting delivers a stellar performance right out of the box. Additionally, you can use optimization WordPress plugins to speed up your website even further across various devices.
Disclaimer: These results represent only a reference. Site speed results depend on multiple factors and hosting configurations which we have not optimized.
Conclusion
We’ve seen customers struggle with unreliable hosting providers that have affected their potential business growth. We realize that web hosting is an essential investment, hence want to make sure that you choose the best one for your website. Check out our recommended hosting providers here.
