It’s an old proverb that "Don’t judge a book by its cover".

Hosting is critical for your website and business. A professional website hosting should allow developer to use latest software, custom security policy, and full control on resource available.

For choosing Hosting are you confused which one to choose?.

Before choosing a hosting you must know about the pros and cons of each one.

# Shared Hosting

In shared hosting, available resources (CPU & Memory) are shared among many customer’s websites which makes it inadequate and less stable. It leads to poor performance due to heavy loads caused by other people big database and exhaustive CPU process and raise vulnerable security threats.

Cons of Shared Hosting :

• Minimum Isolation - In shared web hosting if attackers upload any malicious sites or malware scripts then it will increase risk to all the users whose data are stored in that server.

• File System Security - You don’t have control access of your server and although you have to write outside of your home directory but if someone gain access of server then they will get the complete access of all sites.

• Network Spamming reduces reputation - Shared hosting also means sharing same IP, which can decrease your reputation in case other websites do spamming, get hacked, blacklisted.

# Virtual Private Server (VPS)

On the other side, VPS (Virtual Private Server) are powerful and reliable server with full access to resource and softwares.

Pros of Virtual Private Server :

• Performance and Reliability - A Virtual private server server offers unlimited bandwidth and disk space, and it enables you to have full control to configure your server as you want including hardware, software , IP address controls towards your website and other resources stored at your website.

• Speed and Accessibility - If you want to utilize the best experience of your Joomla website (ecommerce website or performance driven website ) to your visitors then a VPS server is a good option.

• Security - Since you will get a separate virtual server, you will enjoy a higher level of security. It gives you better privacy and improve protection against malwares and malicious scripts.

• Cost Effective - Virtual hosting is excellent value for medium, smaller companies or even start ups that are on tighter budgets. Now a days with VPS are affordable as cheap as $5. We use VPS from digital ocean. They are affordable and stable.

Cons of Virtual Private Server :

• Technical skills - You need to have proficient technical skills to manage and run your server smoothly, or you can hire a server admin to handle this.

• Problem resolving and Maintenance - Diagnosing and solving the problem is little bit difficult as compared to problem solving in shared hosting. But thanks to google and other active community which help to overcome this.

Make sure to have strong backup options as you are free to install your own software and modify your configuration, so have a cover up if any mistake occurs.

It may be possible to save money by using shared hosting, however, your website’s performance may suffer without VPS hosting.

Email address is a great marketing tool for your business. If email is created using your domain name it will increase trust in your customers. So, Most of the server come with sendmail software, which enables you to send emails. But we recommend to use 3rd party email service.

Here are some benefits of using email service over server sendmail softwares : -

• You can mask your server IP address - Hide your sending ip addresses when sending emails using a service.

• Your email will rarely go to spam as you enjoy from reputation of service - If you are sending bulk emails or sending mails too often then relevancy is important and if you use Email service then it reduces risk of spam messages.

• You will be able to debug email sending - Most of Joomla components sends emails using cron and to debug these emails you need to send them to real users. To get it off On staging and testing domain, by changing configuration you can forward these emails to mailtrap.io (Used to Debug Emails) .

• You can track and analyze all emails activity from your website - It help us to keep track of what's happening in your account. You will be able to checked account activity or IP address logs to see from where your account is being accessed . And if you see any strange IP then you can block or restrict those IP addresses.

We use Mandrill for email service and for debugging purpose we use mailtrap.io service.