Let us dwell which is better. There are six major points on which we can evaluate them.
1) Uptime
2) Cost
3) Security
4) Scalability
5) Performance
6) Customization
7) Overall Efficiency
1) Uptime: This is one of the most debated and in-demand features that differentiate VPS and cloud providers. With most of the Cloud providers claiming up to 99.99999 uptime, there is intense competition for this market share and end users are real beneficiaries of this feature.
2) Cost: If VPS offers low-cost benefits, the cloud providers have a pay-as-you-go model with no upfront costs, flexible payment options and host of Cloud only benefits. This is really a game-changer.
3) Security: VPS offers high security and default protection against web attacks, Cloud-based solutions are not to be left behind. With features like Network Security Groups (NSG) and Application Gateway (Web Application Firewall) – WAF , they protect the Cloud servers at the network and application levels as well.
4) Scalability- VPS is restricted to physical servers and cannot really scale out and up as per the demands of the application or web traffic. Cloud hosting solutions really are scalable based on triggers, pre-set conditions and manual scaling as well. Enterprise customers vouch for this benefit alone and its another key differentiator.
5) Performance: With VPS servers, there is a high performance that can be expected. For dynamic websites and mission-critical applications, performance is most critical. In case of a hardware failure, the performance is affected. Cloud Solutions rely on a pool of servers, thereby providing the desired high availability and failure resiliency
6) Customization: It all about having control about what you pay for and tweaking it as per whims and fancies.VPS gives you that freedom, however, you may require the technical expertise to manage the configuration. The cloud solution, on the other hand, locks down most features to enable a friendly user experience compromising on controls and customization.
7) Overall Efficiency: It might be argued that VPS is simple to use hence efficient, however when the stakes are increased and maximum output is the demand of the application, herein Cloud clearly wins it hands down. The range of VM instance type from the burstable performance VMs to the CPU and memory-intensive VMs, the end-user is spoilt for choices and efficiency depends on the type of VM selected.
Let us drill down to the actual benefits first that VPS provides:
1) VPS is highly secure
2) VPS or private cloud can be heavily customized
3) VPS has very high performance
Let us check a few drawbacks as well:
1) VPS is not an exactly scalable solution
2) VPS are sometimes vulnerable to resource crash and dependent applications or websites also crashing as a result.
Let us check the benefits that Cloud hosting has to offer:
1) Cloud hosting is truly scalable
2) Cloud-hosted servers are very secure
The two drawbacks of Cloud hosting are
1) Cloud-based hosted servers are a bit expensive compared to VPS, as the unpredictable auto-scaling demands and High Availability benefits come with a certain price tag.
2) Even though the cloud servers are highly secured, they do leave an element of vulnerability as the cloud servers span across geographic locations and are web-based hence always prone to DDoS and malware attacks.
3) Cloud hosting offers limited customization. As key components are managed and controlled by the Cloud provider, the end-user does not completely control the customizations they can make.
Depending on your requirements and type of business (small business or enterprise), you may choose either of the two.
Some of the best VPS providers are InMotionhosting.com, Hostgater.com, and Hostwinds.com while Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform are a prominent few cloud providers.
