Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS or Dedicated Server?
If you have only a few websites and they are not large, then shared hosting is pretty enough. But if you are running gaming sites, download sites or a large number of blogs, then you may need to consider upgrading.
Even most hosting companies claim their shared hosting is unlimited, actually they DO have limitations. If you violate their TOS, your sites will get in trouble.
Inodes and CPU usages are common limited for shared hosting. For example, HostGator limits maximum 250,000 inodes for each Baby Plan account and use 25 % CPU maximum 90 seconds.
Why is it limited? Because it’s “Shared” hosting. You are sharing a server with others. If a user uses too many resources on this server, other site on it will be influenced. So, the limitation is good for both the hosting companies and the users.
Though reseller hosting is still “sharing”, it’s better than shared hosting when you run multiple sites, especially niche sites, adsense sites.
As mentioned above, most shared hostings have limitation on “inodes” in an shared account, which we can interpret it as “files” for simple understanding. Let’s take HostGator as an example again, once your sites on the shared account exceeds this limitation, your account is in trouble, will get suspended or terminated according to your response to their warnings. When you use reseller account, you can create as many cPanels as needed and each cPanel has 250,000 inodes quota. Thus you can avoid such situation in most cases.
Typically, when I install a WordPress site, it takes about 2,000+ inodes. Of course it varies when your website has different numbers of themes and plugins.
VPS and Dedicated server are independent and will not influenced by other users. But it’s more complicated to handle for average people.
So, for running multiple sites, if your sites tend to exceed the limitation of your shared hosting plan, reseller plan is a good choice rather than VPS or dedicated servers for average people, unless you have other specific purpose.
I use VPS to build large websites, especially those will use a large amount of server resources. I also use VPS to run softwares and apps. My friends use dedicated servers for their gaming sites, ecommerce sites, etc.
So, it’s better to understand what you really need and know more about different hosting choices so that you can find out the best solution for yourself.
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