Hosting differences: web hosting vs. virtual server vs. Docker
Hosting services differ in particular in terms of features, uses and prices. In this article, we will look at three popular options: web hosting, virtual servers and Docker. Hosting means renting server space from a service provider without investing in a server and network connections yourself.
The typical benefits of cloud computing are low cost and ease of maintenance: hardware and network infrastructure are leased rather than purchased. In addition, the data and connectivity backups provided by the service provider reduce the risk if something goes wrong, for example due to thunderstorms or hardware failure.
What are the three options best suited to the purpose and what are their advantages and disadvantages? First, let’s look at web hosting.
Web hosting
Web hosting are the most popular way to set up a website and emails for an organisation on the internet. The popularity and affordability of the web hosting environment is based on sharing server capacity with other customers. Several different customers and websites can be hosted on the same server.
For a web hosted website, it is typical that the site does not have several thousand visitors per day. Typically, small businesses and entrepreneurs have a few hundred visitors per week and for this type of use, a web host is an excellent value for money solution. The website can be built on a modern publishing management system such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal etc.
In addition to websites, webhosting also offers email services, i.e. emails from the customer’s own @domain.fi address are routed through the webhosting server. XetNET’s web hosting packages include authenticated SMTP and encrypted connections, allowing your company’s email traffic to work securely and reliably across different operators’ networks, all over the world.
Setting up and using the web hotels is made easy with an administration tool. Customers can create their own email addresses and install applications themselves, for example using cPanel, which is part of XetNET’s webhosting service.
A web host may not be the best solution if your website or e-commerce is growing rapidly and your visitor traffic is increasing. The more visitors a website serves, and the more complex the website/e-commerce is on the server, the faster the capacity may run out. In this case, it is advisable to move the website from a shared server to a dedicated server, such as a virtual server.
Pros: low cost, fast and easy to deploy. Low cost, easy to use, fast, fast performance, sufficient performance for light and normal use for websites, e-commerce, forums, etc.
Cons: Performance can be degraded if a website has several hundred or even thousands of visitors a day.
Check out our Finnish web hosting services.
Webhotel’s cPanel management tool makes installing applications quick and easy.
Virtual server
A Virtual Private Server (VPS) allows you to rent dedicated capacity from a server, such as one or two vCPU cores, the desired amount of disk space and memory. A virtual server provides muscle for heavy websites with high visitor traffic. In addition, if you want to freely install different applications and software on the server, as well as make custom configurations that cannot be done in a webhost, a virtual server is a natural solution for developers who value a high level of customization.
A virtual server is a slightly more cumbersome option, as configuration and maintenance of settings are typically the responsibility of the client. However, XetNET offers maintenance solutions that make it easy to run the virtual server yourself.
Pros: Full control over software installation and configuration. High fault tolerance and guaranteed performance, ensuring that the load times and speeds of your popular website, e-commerce or web service remain high.
Cons: Requires more server management skills, e.g. Linux skills are required. For example, as an IoT platform, configuring development projects can take a lot of time if the server is running many different applications.
Take a look at our virtual server solutions.
Docker
Docker has attracted a lot of interest over the last few years because it combines the high performance of a virtual server with easy configuration and deployment. Due to architectural differences, for example when compared to a virtual server, Docker’s containers allow for more efficient use of server capacity, including disk space.
This is because instead of virtualising the whole server, only the containers where applications run are virtualised. This improves the capacity of the server in a Docker service. For the end-user, it means a low-cost and fast service, as well as high performance for various project development environments.
In Docker, each container is defined according to the requirements of the application. In this case, the server can run a wide range of applications: websites, IoT services, e-commerce, for example, in two different containers: a database server in one dedicated container and the actual e-commerce application in the other.
Docker also allows for different configurations on an application-specific basis that cannot be done as flexibly on a virtual server. This is due to the virtual server’s server-wide settings, which are not necessarily the same for all applications running. So instead of two virtual servers, it is sufficient to deploy two Docker containers.
Pros: a quick way to start development, no configuration and tuning of the virtual server.
Cons: Not quite the same number of settings to manipulate for someone used to a virtual server.
Check out our Docker services.
PS. Are you looking for a Finnish hosting service provider? Read the overview of our services at Hostingadvice.com’s blog.
