Hosting Wars: VPS Hosting vs Shared Hosting – Which is Faster?

Updated October 9, 2020

The internet is flooding with companies claiming their hosting is faster than everyone else. Some even claim to have two kinds of hosting, the kind that’s fast and the kind that’s 10x, 20x, or 50x faster than their “fast” hosting. Sorry, but if you’re selling two kinds of hosting and one is faster than the other, you’ve got “fast” and “slow”. And who knowingly signs up for slow hosting?

The problem with comparing different types of hosting is that oftentimes people try to compare two different companies as well. When you’re comparing 2 different companies and 2 different types of hosting accounts, you’ve got a multivariate equation. If you recall from math class, those are a pain to solve for when you can instead deal with a single variable version!

Read on to see whether VPS Hosting is faster than Web Hosting…

What is VPS Hosting?

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. Hosting companies start with a full server, or dedicated server as it’s called. It can be used to house a single customer, though that customer can choose to keep all for themselves or slice and dice it into segments for use by others.

VPS Hosting is where a dedicated server is divided into several virtual servers. Each virtual server looks and feels like a dedicated server, to the end user customer, but has a slice of resources. You can divide a dedicated server into 2 VPS slices and that enables 2 customers to each have ½ the total resources. You can divide a dedicated server into 4 VPS slices or 8 VPS slices or as many ways as you want to slice it up, depending on how much resources you have to start with.

Example:

KnownHost has some dedicated hosting where the server includes:
       – 64 GB RAM
       – 24 CPU Cores
       – 960 GB Storage
       – 20 TB Bandwidth

Splitting that into several VPS, each customer could get:
       – 2 GB RAM
       – 2 CPU Cores
       – 50 GB Storage
       – 2 TB Bandwidth

Doing the math on this, you can see that at least 10 VPS’s could be created on a server with the top dedicated specification. Depending on how you spec’d out the VPS, there could be double or triple that number easily, with each VPS customer getting plenty of resources to run most common web applications.

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared Hosting is also a case of a dedicated server being divided up into segments for each customer, but unlike a VPS, customers don’t get the same level of control over the server hardware and software.

Shared Hosting typically includes much lower specification than a VPS. You’ll get less of each resource type, which means a VPS is much more powerful than a Shared Hosting account.

Remember that even a basic VPS can include:
       – 2 GB RAM
       – 2 CPU Cores
       – 50 GB Storage

Instead, basic Shared Hosting will have:
       – 0.5 GB RAM
       – 0.5 CPU Cores
       – 5 GB Storage

As you can see, a basic VPS has enough resources to power 4 Shared Hosting accounts. The VPS is at least 4x as powerful!

Which is Faster, VPS or Shared Hosting?

If you’re comparing the same hosting company VPS to their Shared Hosting, 99%+ of the time, the VPS will outperform Shared Hosting because it has more resources available.

By having more memory and CPU cores on tap, a VPS can handle more simultaneous requests, perform more actions in the same amount of time and generally dish out web content at a faster rate than a Shared Hosting plan.

With some companies, you might get different hardware being used on a VPS than Shared, just as you might get different software used.

Web Server Differences

There are performance differences between NGINX, LiteSpeed and Apache, particularly when there are limited resources available to them. If a hosting company offers a VPS with one and a Shared account with another, there could be some variations in head to head performance.

RAM & Storage Differences

There are performance differences between spinning platter hard drives and SSD storage, just as there are differences between NAS, SAN dedicated ECC DDR4 RAM, etc. If a hosting company equips their VPS accounts using different RAM and/or storage than their Shared Hosting accounts, there can be performance differences.

KnownHost Dependability

You can count on the fact that KnownHost equips VPS, Web Hosting and Reseller Accounts with high performance hardware, software and networking. There’s no need to look for excuses or disclaimers – all KnownHost accounts are fast. There are no secret switches we flip to charge you extra to get 10x, 20x or 50x faster than our other accounts. They’re all FAST!

Conclusion

Count on the fact that VPS Hosting is going to be faster than Shared Hosting when you’re comparing products from within the same company, most all of the time. Some bargain providers who don’t include managed hosting as their standard offer (KnownHost offers all managed hosting plans) will have questionable speeds across a range of products.

The best way to get fast hosting is to choose a highly rated hosting provider that uses exclusively high performance hardware, software and premium networking, like KnownHost.

Test our speeds on Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting. We guarantee you won’t be disappointed with either!