Hosting Platforms – Which is the right one for you?

23 Nov 2021, by Slade Baylis

Taking your first step into the world of setting up websites and email accounts can feel like you’ve suddenly been shoved into the cockpit of a passenger jet and asked to fly it.  You look around trying to find the right buttons to press, hoping that everything doesn’t start to fall apart the moment you do. 

Whether it’s trying to find out what different website hosting options are out there; choosing between included or dedicated email hosting; or even trying to figure out if a Virtual Private Server (VPS) would be a better option - there is a lot to understand and keep in mind when making these decisions.  And with all this information and complexity, where are you meant to start to be able to learn and make informed decisions? 

The answers to these questions is exactly why we’ve decided to put this article together.  We want to help customers understand the differences between the various hosting services that we offer.  We want to provide you with explanations of the purpose of each platform, the key benefits of each, as well as inform you of the other factors that you should keep in mind when choosing between them.  The aim here is to offer an easy-to-understand guide so that you’ll be able to walk away with a greater understanding about what’s available and what will work best for your particular needs.

Shared Web Hosting – The entry level to hosting websites and email accounts

Shared Web Hosting (SWH) is the standard entry-point for most businesses.  Such an account usually provides all the basics that a business would need for their online presence.  It allows you to host a website, as well as create email accounts for sending and receiving emails through your own domain.  This is perceived as being a lot more business-like and regarded as being a big step up professionally than using @hotmail.com or @gmail.com addresses.

What is Shared Web Hosting (SWH)?

As the name suggests, with a SWH account, the server that your website and email accounts are hosted on is not exclusively used by a single website.  In fact, many websites belonging to many separate businesses can be hosted by a single server.  Advanced software is used to partition servers into discrete accounts that each organisation can use to manage their own systems.  With this technology, businesses are able to get hosting services for their website and email at a fraction of what it would cost if they were to require an entire server to themselves.  This can take the ongoing costs of running your own website from hundreds of dollars per month, to less than a couple of cups of coffee per month!

Now if that’s the case and you can save quite a bit of money by sharing server space, why then would organisations want to use entirely their own servers?  The answer is that there are several factors that can play into that decision.

Server Management 

With a SWH service, the configuration and management of the server itself is in the hands of the hosting provider.  Doing it this way provides a huge benefit for smaller businesses, as they don’t need the expertise or staff to manage the server for them.  Any updates that need to be performed, any software that needs to be re-configured, or any ongoing hardware maintenance tasks that need to be completed are entirely managed by the hosting provider.  This can be a huge load off their shoulders, as it means that they can now focus on running their business, rather than on the IT infrastructure required to run their website and email.

Though, this shouldn’t be confused with a “managed” hosting service.  Such “managed” services entail more than just the management of the server - as they usually have plans that also include the management and updating of websites that are installed into any hosting plans. 

For some however, having full administrator access and control over the server could be an essential requirement.  We’ll cover this later on, but in short, this would require that they have their own server.  Whether it’s to be able to install custom software requirements server-wide or a need to control the configuration of the entire server, that level of access is only possible when you are not sharing the server with other users.

Contended vs Dedicated Resources

Another key factor is the resource requirement for the websites being hosted on the platform.  In order for a website to function, it requires resources from the server. This includes CPU for the processing that the server needs to do every time someone visits your website.  It also includes Memory/RAM on the server so that your website can store information temporarily when someone’s going through your website - such as storing the products they’ve selected in a shopping cart. 

With platforms that come with “dedicated” resources, whatever resources you have assigned to you will sit there idle waiting for you to use them.  With this approach you know that should you need them, the resources will be available.  For instance, if you have a sudden spike in website traffic that requires all of your CPU power - then your server will start using those resources right away to handle those extra visitors. 

When you are on a service with other users though, things are a little different.  You are still given access to a certain amount of resources, however, those resources don’t sit idle waiting for you to use them.  Instead, many users on the server will need CPU and RAM at different times and will be using those even if you don’t.  This is what is referred to as “resource contention”.   It basically means that if your website needs server resources, it will be given the resources that are available at that particular time.  Most of the time, this shouldn't be an issue, as the resources would most likely be available and the site could get them, however, there is no guarantee that they will always be available to you.

As you can infer from the description of resource contention, how likely it is that the resources won’t be available when you need them depends almost entirely on how “full” your provider has made the server. 

From a hosting provider’s perspective, providing shared hosting is a balancing act between the number of accounts on a server, the resource requirements of those accounts, and the overall resources on the server itself.  If there are too many accounts, or if they need more resources than the server has, then some accounts are not going to get all the resources they need.  On the other end, if the server has too few accounts on it and only a fraction of the total resources are being used, then this can be an indication that the server is too empty. 

In that balancing act between too few and too many accounts, most cheap providers will lean towards overloading their servers.  They do this in order to make them as profitable as possible, with little regard to the performance impact it will cause for their users.  Here at Micron21 though, we instead choose to be conservative with our resource allocations, preferring to increase the likelihood that all accounts will have the resources that they need.  Though, even with our approach, the only way to guarantee that you will have the resources every time you need them is to choose to host on a service with dedicated CPU and RAM.

Simple & Scalable Email Hosting

As mentioned earlier, SWH services also usually come with the ability to host email accounts on your own domain.  This is a huge step up from using free email services from either your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or other services such as Gmail or Hotmail, all of which can be seen as unprofessional to do business through!

Within your hosting account with most providers, you are able to create an unlimited amount of email accounts.  This allows you to create as many addresses that you need, all without any additional costs to pay per month. You can also easily manage these through your hosting administrator area, being able to change passwords, set disk space limits or even access the email accounts directly through a browser-based WebMail portal.

However, there are some drawbacks to this system, as it’s not a specialised email hosting solution.  Whilst the system does come with spam filtering, it’s not as sophisticated as other dedicated email hosting solutions (such as our Hosted Exchange platform) and may let more spam through because of it.   Also, the emails themselves take up space within your hosting account, meaning that they count towards its overall disk space limit. This can be a large issue for customers who need to store large amounts of email history.

For value for money, though, you can’t get better than free!  As a free extra that comes along with website hosting, it’s a great entry point into basic email functionality for many businesses. 

Benefits & Drawbacks -  Is SWH the best choice for you?

When choosing a platform, any solution is going to have advantages and disadvantages when comparing with other options.  We’ll summarise the key points in favour of using shared web hosting below, as well as the other considerations that might indicate a different solution is a better fit.

Benefits 

• Cheaper to host both your website and email accounts
• No need to manage your own server environment, as that is the responsibility of the hosting provider
• No complicated server setup necessary, hosting is ready-to-use right out of the box
• Comes with basic email hosting for unlimited email accounts
• Control over your hosting account through a simple administrator panel
• Hosting accounts are replicated across several servers, to make sure that they never go down
• Hourly backups via Acronis
• Enterprise-grade Dell hardware

Drawbacks 

• Server configuration is set by hosting provider and is unable to be changed for specific clients
• No administrator access to server
• Resources are contended rather than dedicated
• Email hosting is simple, with limited disk space, and lacks advanced features and spam filtering

Virtual Private Servers – For when you need increased performance or more control

The next platform up from our Shared Web Hosting (SWH) platform is our Virtual Private Server (VPS) service.  This solution is the entry point for customers who need the full administrator access and control over their server configuration.  This solution allows clients to set their own resource limits, add optional applications to get additional features, or even set up custom backup schedules to be stored in off-site or third-party locations.  That’s just to name a few!  If one word summarises the difference between SWH and VPS hosting, it’s .... “control”. 

Administrator Access & Control

Whether it’s for regulatory reasons or just personal preference, some people will need to have control over the environments that host their applications.  This can include needing to install custom software that requires full “root” access (another term for full administrator access) and needs be installed server-wide.  Or it could be that they need to be able to tweak the server options to meet certain regulatory requirements.

With websites that take direct credit card payments for example, often banks will require that the hosting environments be configured in particular ways before they will authorise you to take payments.  These configuration standards are called PCI Compliance and are strict in terms of what settings need to be enabled and which others need to be disabled.  To have that level of control, you will need to host your website on a platform that you have full access to.  That customisability is one of the advantages that you gain from having an entire server to yourself.

More Resources, Cheaper Costs

The physical servers (aka "hosts") used by our VPS platform are top-of-the-line Dell servers with equally top-end CPU architecture.  The disks used in the platform are also NVMe SSD drives, which are some of the fastest available today.   With the platform utilising some of the best hardware available, it might surprise you to know how economical it is to upgrade your server resources.

Once you’ve overcome the initial hurdle of moving to a VPS service, the costs to add additional resources such as CPU, RAM, or disk space is minimal.  This means that for those customers that need a scalable solution, a VPS service ends up being a much more cost effective solution than our SWH range.  On our KVM VPS platform, adding 25 GB more of top-of-the-line NVMe SSD storage only costs an extra $6.50 (inc-GST) p/m.  When a single standard website usually takes up less space than that, it’s easy to see where the value is. With CPU, extra cores can be added for as little $11.00 p/m (inc-GST) each, and extra RAM is only $5.50 p/m (inc-GST) per GB! This makes scaling a server up to meet your requirements trivial.

It should be noted that whilst VPS servers are entire servers that clients can use to host their applications, at the host level they are still contended services like the SWH services mentioned previously.  That contention is lower than on SWH platforms, but VPS platforms don't usually provide dedicated CPU or RAM resources.

Freedom of Choice

The thing that you ultimately gain when choosing to host on your own server, is the ability to set up whatever sort of environment you require.  For example, if you need the same sort of SWH service on your own server for your own clients, then you can do that! This is because your own VPS can be configured with cPanel so that you can start selling SWH to your own customers.  Alternatively, if you don’t need any additional software and just want to host a website on a simple Linux server to save you money on licensing – then you can do that too!  No matter what you need configured, with your own server, you can achieve it.

On the server management front, instead of that being part of the included costs of operating the environment, we provide this as an optional extra to keep costs down if you don’t need it.  So if you already have the knowledge and expertise in order to operate and maintain your server, then you won’t need to take up this optional extra.  However, for those customers who would prefer a more hands-off approach, we have Customer Care support plans available to enable that.  Either way, we leave that choice to our customers, so that they can decide on which approach would work best for them.

Benefits & Drawbacks – Is VPS the best choice for you? 

With our VPS platform, our clients are able to set up servers that gives them a higher level of control over their systems.  With that higher access, they can configure things just as needed for their specific needs.

Benefits

• Full administrator access to your server
• Able to fully configure and customise server as needed
• Adding further resources is relatively cheap
• Freedom to choose what is and isn’t included in services
• Enterprise-grade Dell hardware

Drawbacks

• More expensive than Shared Web Hosting (SWH) services
• Whilst resources are much less contended than our SWH range, they still aren’t fully dedicated

VMware Cloud Servers – Performance and control with added High Availability

Next comes our ultimate platform – the VMware Cloud Server (VCS) range.  Just like the previous VPS platform, a VCS is a virtualised server that gives you full access and control over your own server and thus the ability to configure it as required.  However, unlike the previous VPS platform, servers on our VCS platform come with added protections against down-time through a feature called High Availability.

Protection against hardware-caused outages 

With most VPS solutions, even though they are virtual servers, they are still reliant on the underlying physical servers being operational for the server to run without issue. Yes, even AWS and Azure servers are reliant on physical servers running smoothly for your server to operate!  What this means is that if there is some form of issue with the server, like the CPU or some other component failing, then your virtual server that’s running on it will go offline. 

There are ways to mitigate against this risk though, such as by running two duplicated environments side-by-side, but these options are often expensive.  At a minimum, they can often double hosting infrastructure costs.  However, here at Micron21 we’re able to provide protection against those sorts of hardware-caused outages and provide a High Availability service through a technology called Hyper-Convergence.

We’ve touched on this earlier in a recent article about how you can protect mission-critical services through Hyper-Convergence.  In short though, our higher tier VCS solutions come with High Availability protection as a standard.  This means that our VCS customers are protected against their services having down-time caused by potential hardware failures.

 Dedicated Resources

As mentioned earlier when discussing our SWH and VPS services, some services are built to make use of contended resources to help keep costs down and provide an entry-level and affordable service.  With our VMware platforms though, we aim to provide top-tier services with guarantees regarding the performance and reliability of systems hosted on them.  To achieve that performance aspect, all provided resources are “dedicated” rather than “contended”, meaning that the resources are guaranteed to be available when you need them.  Whilst with other platforms you are highly likely to have access to use the resources that come with your service, with VCS servers it’s not just a high probability, it’s a guarantee!

With our VMware Hyper-Converged environments, we make sure that we have plenty of excess capacity - not only so that users can get all of the resources that they rely on, but so they can also expand their systems if need be.

Full Environment Management 

Just like with our VPS services, when hosting solutions on VMware, our clients are able to have full administrator access to their servers.  However, an even higher level of access is given that allows users the ability to easily manage the server at the hyper-visor level.  In layman’s terms, what this means is that clients can manage their server’s resource allocations directly, modify the network settings themselves, or even access the server via a Virtual Console which emulates a monitor being connected. 

With this higher level of access and control, clients are able to manage their servers as if they were physical servers that they had direct physical access to.  If required, we can even set up users with pools of CPU, RAM, and Disk resources that they can then use to create as many virtual machines as they need.  This effectively means they are able to run an entire virtual data centre entirely over the internet!

Benefits & Drawbacks – Is VCS the best choice for you? 

Our VMware platform truly is the end all and be all for reliable, high-performance, and controllable system infrastructure.  High Availability and top-of-the-line Dell hardware means that this platform is an easy choice either for hosting mission-critical systems or for customers who just need that extra peace of mind.

Benefits

• Higher level of administrator access to servers and the overall environment
• A no-fuss High Availability service that protects your environment from hardware-caused outages without additional configuration
• Dedicated resources, guaranteeing resource availability when you need it
• Significantly more cost-effective than equivalent services through AWS or Azure
• Enterprise-grade Dell hardware

Drawbacks

• The cost of a high-availability solution is going to be higher than solutions without that protection

Hosted Exchange – Premium email hosting

The categories above cover our main hosting environments, but they don’t cover our alternative option for email hosting.   As mentioned, our SWH services come with rudimentary email hosting services, but they aren’t really aimed at providing resilient and fully-featured email hosting.  They definitely serve a purpose, but transitioning away and onto something more professional should be a part of every organisation’s long-term plan. Our Hosted Exchange service is aimed to fill that gap and provide large, resilient, and feature-rich email functionality.

Higher-tier features for a higher-tier service

Each mailbox is provided with a large amount of storage, with a whopping 50 GB per email accounts, which is nearly always enough for even power users!   All email accounts also come with enterprise-grade email filtering services, significantly reducing the likelihood of spam or malicious emails coming through to your users. Just like our SWH service, email accounts can be accessed via a web-based portal in case users don’t have an email client installed.   Advanced rules can also be set up regarding access to one mailbox from another, or authorisation for one user to send emails through to another account.  Finally, as the software sits within the broader Microsoft product line, the service fully integrates with Microsoft Outlook.  This allows for synchronisation of not only emails, but calendars, contacts, and the like. 

The cost of reliability

With all these features, there is one downside when compared with the shared hosting alternative.  Instead of being able to have unlimited accounts at no additional cost, each Hosted Exchange account has a cost of $7.70 p/m (inc-GST).  This price is standard in the industry for higher-tier email services. 

For other offerings in the market, Google’s lowest offering is called G Suite and costs $9.24 p/m (inc-GST), however it comes with 20 GB less storage and doesn’t include backups.  Similarly, Microsoft’s Office 365 offering start at $ $7.59 p/m (inc GST) but don’t include backups or enterprise-grade email filtering.  This is why we think our Hosted Exchange offering is the better service for businesses that are more security-conscious and require a higher level of reliability.

Due to the difference in price with SWH options, if you currently have a lot of email accounts and are looking at moving to such a system, we recommend reviewing which accounts are needed and which can be set up as forwarders/aliases.  Doing this will allow you to consolidate your accounts to save on costs.

Benefits & Drawbacks – Is Hosted Exchange the best choice for you? 

For customers who need a higher-grade of email security or increased reliability, our Hosted Exchange platform makes a lot of sense.  It speaks volumes that we don’t often hear from our Hosted Exchange clients, as things just keep running smoothly! 

Benefits

• Large amount of email storage (50GB) per email account
• Enterprise-grade email filtering that substantially reduces spam and malicious emails
• Advanced configurations possible, allowing users access to other accounts if necessary
• Browser based web portal (Outlook Web Access) that allows for Outlook-like experience without needing additional applications
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook for synchronised emails, calendars, contacts, etc
• More reliable than email services included with hosting plans
• Full 30-day journaling of email accounts
• Cheaper than other equivalent dedicated email hosting solutions

Drawbacks

• More expensive than email hosting provided with hosting plans
• Charged by the email account

Still have questions about where to begin?

If you still have questions about where to begin, that’s okay.  There's quite a lot to take in about each of these services, how they work, as well as which would be best in different situations.  But you don’t have to face that challenge alone.  We’re more than happy to have a discussion with you about your current circumstances, budget, goals, and thus guide you through that process!

If you are interested, feel free to give us a call on 1300 769 972 (Option #1) or email us at sales@micron21.com and we’ll work it through with you.