Dedicated vs VPS vs Shared
Noisy neighbour, hypervisor overhead, compliance.
Learning objectives
- Compare shared, VPS, and dedicated bare metal
- Identify noisy-neighbour and compliance drivers
- Choose the right tier for Workshop Co. stages
Hosting tiers
| Tier | Isolation | Control | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | Low — shared Apache/PHP | Panel only | $ |
| VPS | VM boundary on shared hardware | Root, custom stack | $$ |
| Dedicated / bare metal | Full physical server | Root, hardware choice | $$$ |
VPS internals
A hypervisor (KVM, VMware, Proxmox — Book 5) slices one physical machine into VMs. Workshop Co.’s VPS gets guaranteed vCPU and RAM, but the underlying disk and network may still be shared. A neighbour’s runaway query can affect I/O latency — usually rare on quality hosts.
When bare metal wins
- Sustained high CPU — batch image processing for class galleries
- Predictable disk IOPS for MySQL under peak booking
- Compliance requiring single-tenant hardware
- Custom kernel modules or unusual network tuning
- Large RAM footprint (128 GB+) cost-effective vs many VMs
When VPS wins
- Staging, dev, low-traffic marketing sites
- Fast spin-up and hourly billing for experiments
- Automatic migration if host hardware fails (depends on provider)
Workshop Co. — tier map
- Production web + DB
- Bare metal (Year 3 plan)
- Staging
- VPS at
203.0.113.99 - Marketing microsite tests
- Shared or VPS — disposable
- SaaS (Google Workspace) — not on either
Most growing businesses mix tiers. Do not over-buy bare metal on day one — migrate when metrics justify it.
Try it yourself — decision tree
Workshop Co. needs a Redis cache. Traffic moderate. VPS has spare RAM. Bare metal DB already provisioned. Where should Redis run?
Answer
Start on the bare metal app server locally (low latency to PHP) if RAM allows — or a small VPS if you want isolation from DB memory pressure. Dedicated Redis box is overkill until cluster scale.
Quick quiz
- What is a noisy neighbour problem?
- Does VPS always mean shared physical hardware?
- One reason Workshop Co. keeps staging on VPS?
Answers
- Another tenant’s workload degrades your performance on shared resources.
- Yes — VPS is a VM on physical host unless provider offers “dedicated CPU” slices.
- Cost, isolation from prod, easy rebuild when testing breaks the stack.