-1

You can get a reliable web host for a few bucks a month. But for the same VPS, it might cost you $10 a month. Why are specialized servers for purposes like web cheaper (for the consumer) than a generalized shared hosting? If I marketed servers for XYZ as opposed to just say Linux, would my costs be lower? (or is the VPS industry just greedier than the web hosting industry)

bobbybee
  • 117
  • 3
  • Please see [How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?](http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/q/20838/17007) at our sister site [webmasters.se]. – Michael Hampton Jul 15 '13 at 19:37
  • @MichaelHampton That is about which hosting options you have, this is about why they are so. – bobbybee Jul 15 '13 at 19:41

1 Answers1

4

Because they use more resouces. Simple like that. You can put hundreds of websites on a decent machine, but not that many VPS - VPS has a much larger overhead, mostly along RAM and IO - general advice is IIRC around 8 virtual processors per physical processor. RAM that you give to a VPS has to be there - most web hosts have no designated RAM allocated etc. - all that means a lot less VPS on a physical machine (and seriously, do not think those super cheap websites allocate more than maybe 64mb of memory to your site).

To give you an example - assume you run 20 VM's on a host. At 1gb per VPS that is 20gb (+overhead - likely more like 24gb) RAM. Comes patch day - you have 20 machines hitting IO.

20 websites? ;) My phone can run that (ok, that IS a joke, as you can see in the comments up, from Micheal - I often make jokes of people not knowing what "lot of hardware" is comparing that to my phone.... which incidentally is faster than the workstations I had around year 2000).

So, basically:

  • Higher Memory pressure
  • Higher IO pressure.

How many web servers do you know that run 8 disc Raid 10 groups? Hint - those are too slow to run a 32gb virtual host under heavy load. You could easily run a LOT of websites on that ;)

Now, obviously - the customer has to pay for those additional resources. The real calculation is obviously opinion based (and I will not agree that there is some high pricing going on here, especially if you look at the per month pricing of cloud based VM's - azure, amazon etc. - they are heavy), but there are - as said - given good reasons for that. Fundamentally - a VPS is a lot heavier than a website.

TomTom
  • 51,649
  • 7
  • 54
  • 136
  • Makes sense. Would running parallel processes of a heavy app still come out ahead though (10 parallel game servers vs 10 vps)? – bobbybee Jul 15 '13 at 20:09
  • Yes. Remember - a VPS has a graphics card. 10vps - even at 32mb per simulated graphics card - is wasted 320mb. Kernel space. Lots of interrupts for simulated hardware etc. that are just not there in a process. – TomTom Jul 15 '13 at 20:10
  • I see. This is moving more into StackOverflow ground, but if I did an app that would make users which have 700 for permissions, would there still be a significant advantage over real VPS, or is that just adding unnecessary security holes and wasted functionality? – bobbybee Jul 15 '13 at 20:12
  • No idea. This is Unix specific, and I am a Microsoft guy. "700 for permission" tells me nothing. – TomTom Jul 15 '13 at 20:13
  • User can read+write, no-one can – bobbybee Jul 15 '13 at 20:13
  • Depends a lot how you configure it. In general. for security, obviously a VPS is better - a stupid programming mistake does stop at the VPS. It depends a lot how good the rest of the app is, what the app does etc. - there are many piceces of software that are multi-user-capable without requiring separate operating systems. – TomTom Jul 15 '13 at 20:15