A nagging question gnawing at most newbie website owners is about the affordability of shared hosting as compared to VPS plans. While a lot of people automatically assume that shared hosting can help them save more than VPS hosting, the answer will shock you.

A straight forward answer to the query about the affordability is that VPS can prove to be significantly cheaper if you take into account its features and buy it from certain web hosting providers. VPS hosting lies right in between shared hosting and dedicated hosting plans.

With VPS hosting you get truly affordable access to a partition of the server that is exclusively dedicated to your network of websites. Here is a look at some of the features of such a hosting plan and makes it better than shared hosting.

Billing: Monthly vs. Annually

One of the primary advantages of using a VPS plan is their convenient monthly billing cycle as opposed to the annual billing plan offered with shared hosting. With VPS hosting you only end up paying for the month that you are about to use albeit in advance. While most shared hosting providers use their extremely low monthly charge of $5 as their USP; the fact remains that this comes to an initial set up cost of $60 plus.

As opposed to this, a VPS plan will cost you more at $10 or even $20 per month but you only pay for the following month when you are ready to host the site. Also the cumulative cost of purchasing the plan and setting it up is significantly lower in case of VPS hosting as compared to shared hosting.

The unique features of VPS hosting that give it an edge over shared hosting.

With a VPS hosting plan, the buyer is in complete control not only of the amount of money that he initially invests for hosting but also the sever partition and the software configuration. This means that although you pay a little more for VPS hosting the degree of flexibility that this plan entails makes it well worth the cost.

One of the distinct disadvantages of using shared hosting is the problems that come into play when a single central resource (the server) has to be shared with numerous other websites, which can lead to concerns associated with having others sites in your IP range that can have malicious intent. For instance, many legitimate businesses are thrown into a quandary as they are sent offline for several hours while unrelated webmasters make merry on their data just because they also happen to share a site on the same server.

However, with VPS hosting, you get a distinct partition of the server exclusively dedicated to your websites; this completely eliminates the risk of nefarious activities. Also, you will be able to easily install new web applications and software on the server without worrying about others.

How VPS hosting can help your business save money?

VPS hosting is less prone to downtime and the dedicated partition of the server equates to superior performance than shared hosting. This means that you will not lose out on the potential customers who are turned away just because you site is down thus generating higher profits and retaining brand value. Since VPS hosting is more powerful, you can offer greater functionality to your clients by installing server side web applications that will make life easy for the administrator and enhance the browsing experience of your visitors.