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You can get a reliable web host for a few bucks a month. But for the same VPS, it might cost you $10 a month. Why are specialized servers for purposes like web cheaper (for the consumer) than a generalized shared hosting? If I marketed servers for XYZ as opposed to just say Linux, would my costs be lower? (or is the VPS industry just greedier than the web hosting industry)

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Because they use more resouces. Simple like that. You can put hundreds of websites on a decent machine, but not that many VPS - VPS has a much larger overhead, mostly along RAM and IO - general advice is IIRC around 8 virtual processors per physical processor. RAM that you give to a VPS has to be there - most web hosts have no designated RAM allocated etc. - all that means a lot less VPS on a physical machine (and seriously, do not think those super cheap websites allocate more than maybe 64mb of memory to your site).

To give you an example - assume you run 20 VM's on a host. At 1gb per VPS that is 20gb (+overhead - likely more like 24gb) RAM. Comes patch day - you have 20 machines hitting IO.

20 websites? ;) My phone can run that (ok, that IS a joke, as you can see in the comments up, from Micheal - I often make jokes of people not knowing what "lot of hardware" is comparing that to my phone.... which incidentally is faster than the workstations I had around year 2000).

So, basically:

  • Higher Memory pressure
  • Higher IO pressure.

How many web servers do you know that run 8 disc Raid 10 groups? Hint - those are too slow to run a 32gb virtual host under heavy load. You could easily run a LOT of websites on that ;)

Now, obviously - the customer has to pay for those additional resources. The real calculation is obviously opinion based (and I will not agree that there is some high pricing going on here, especially if you look at the per month pricing of cloud based VM's - azure, amazon etc. - they are heavy), but there are - as said - given good reasons for that. Fundamentally - a VPS is a lot heavier than a website.

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  • Makes sense. Would running parallel processes of a heavy app still come out ahead though (10 parallel game servers vs 10 vps)?
    – bobbybee
    Jul 15, 2013 at 20:09
  • Yes. Remember - a VPS has a graphics card. 10vps - even at 32mb per simulated graphics card - is wasted 320mb. Kernel space. Lots of interrupts for simulated hardware etc. that are just not there in a process.
    – TomTom
    Jul 15, 2013 at 20:10
  • I see. This is moving more into StackOverflow ground, but if I did an app that would make users which have 700 for permissions, would there still be a significant advantage over real VPS, or is that just adding unnecessary security holes and wasted functionality?
    – bobbybee
    Jul 15, 2013 at 20:12
  • No idea. This is Unix specific, and I am a Microsoft guy. "700 for permission" tells me nothing.
    – TomTom
    Jul 15, 2013 at 20:13
  • User can read+write, no-one can
    – bobbybee
    Jul 15, 2013 at 20:13

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