Problem is, it usually isn’t true.
The TL/DR of this post is that semi-dedicated is a perfect choice for users who need something more powerful than traditional shared hosting, but who aren’t ready to invest in a dedicated server. Read on to find out why, or start browsing our semi-dedicated cPanel hosting plans now.
Semi-dedicated hosting is a special kind of shared hosting. Semi-dedicated hosting has all the features and benefits of shared hosting, but with only 15 customers per server. That’s roughly 90% fewer customers per server, which means your site gets roughly 10x its share of important resources like CPU power, disk I/O, and network throughput.
On the other side of today’s discussion is a “VPS”, or “virtual private server“. A VPS is similar to shared hosting in that multiple customers (usually around 10 – 30) share one server (also called a “node”). Some hosts (again, usually “discount” VPS providers) add a lot more. But that’s where the similarities end.
With shared hosting, everybody shares the same operating system. They share the same webserver, the same database server, the same firewall, the same mailserver, everything. As long as the server isn’t overcrowded, this isn’t a problem. With a VPS, each customer has their own instance of the operating system. They also have their own webserver, their own database server, and so on. This means that instead of just running one webserver, the node has to run 20 webservers … and 20 mail servers, and 20 database servers, and 20 independent filesystems, and so on.
Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was still stumbling around like an adorable little tyke, a little piece of software called Apache revolutionized everything. Long story short, Apache made it practical for just anyone to host their own website. While Apache wasn’t the first webserver, it was by far the most popular.
As a result, shared hosting started to take on a bad name — ESPECIALLY on those so-called “discount” hosts.
Starting in the late 2000s, a number of technologies matured enough that shared hosting started to rapidly gain in performance. Accelerated webservers like LiteSpeed and nginx, both of which serve websites much faster than Apache, began to take hold. Front-end caches like Varnish started growing in popularity. Content distribution networks, once outrageously expensive and out of reach for the average website owner, got turned upside down by CloudFlare’s excellent free and affordable service tiers. SSD storage made disk I/O operations skyrocket in performance. And the list goes on and on.
It wasn’t much longer until people realized that with all these new tools, shared hosting was more powerful than ever. Suddenly sites that used to be too big or too popular for shared hosting were once again able to be hosted on this economical platform.
Semi-dedicated hosting takes all the benefits of shared hosting, but slashes the number of users on the server. Instead of hosting around 100 – 150 users, each server hosts a maximum of only 15 users. That’s one tenth the load of a typical shared hosting server, which means you get more CPU power, more memory, more I/O performance, and a more network performance. In other words, fewer customers on the server means more resources for you.
Semi-dedicated is perfect for customers who have outgrown regular shared hosting, but who aren’t ready for the financial commitment or management requirements of a VPS. And because you’re still sharing a server with other customers, our semi-dedicated packages start at about one-third the cost of a comparably equipped VPS!
Let’s look at the cost breakdown for a very modest VPS that’s comparable to our semi-dedicated hosting plans:
That’s a total price of $101.17 / month for a fully-managed, mid-grade VPS with LiteSpeed. And while that’s a pretty impressive price, our semi-dedicated plans start at $24.99 / month, and our full-throttle top-of-the-line semi-dedicated package still costs $30 less per month!
Truth is, there are countless times when a VPS is the best choice — but “I need my site to be faster” isn’t one of them.
If it’s raw performance you’re after, semi-dedicated hosting is the way to go. If you need total control over your environment, send a lot of mail, or just want maximum security and isolation, a VPS is your best choice. Check out our packages today, and let’s talk about which is best for you!
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