


Note
Both Dedicated and Cloud hosting both have the option to have fully managed or, self-managed options. Unmanaged means, you’ll be responsible for running routine software updates and other management tasks which are essential to its nominal operation, as opposed to your host provided assistance. The choice to go managed or unmanaged is better left to a broader discussion but, as you can probably imagine, the unmanaged choice is usually the cheaper option.
Cloud hosting usually wins over with price, as there is no hardware to purchase and, you usually only pay for what you use or need. As your business grows, you’ll be able to scale up by adding more space for more or larger websites or scale down to utilize only what’s needed. Because Dedicated Servers are actual physical pieces of hardware that you own, sometimes a setup fee can be associated with them. Having your own Dedicated Server also means you’ll have the freedom of paying for maximum power, even though the server may not be utilizing all of its resources. Your hosting provider can maintain both Cloud VPS and Dedicated servers but, dedicated servers will often need an additional team with a deeper understanding of resource monitoring and troubleshooting. Lastly, Cloud VPS average entry-level VPS servers start at around $60 per month while an entry-level dedicated server starts off around $199 per month.
Cloud Costs
- An average entry-level server runs about $60 per month
- No hardware to buy
- Unlimited resource scaling
- You only pay for what you use
Dedicated Costs
- Average entry level $199 per month
- Increased stability
- limited resource issues
- May include an initial setup fee

Uptime is defined as the amount of time your server is online and available to your users. For most, uptime is of the utmost importance because businesses rely on the revenue or information that their site provides. More frequently, cloud environments uptimes are improving although, there is always the chance of downtime due to resource abuse from other customers residing on the same server. Dedicated servers face similar issues but, those issues can be due to different reasons such as hardware failures. You’ll also find cloud environments are very resilient and, redundant with their environmental setup and also are ideal when scaling up is needed as this usually involves minimal downtime. When scaling up within a dedicated environment, downtime can have an initial impact on your overall uptime but, this is usually limited to the actual time that’s needed to complete the hardware swap. Regardless of the minimal downtime involved in scaling up, dedicated servers are well known for their superb uptime and stability. Dedicated servers are also a favorite of larger e-commerce businesses that need solid performance and speed larger mission-critical websites need.
Cloud Uptime
- More for small to medium business because uptime can sometimes be an issue
- Resilient and Redundant
- Can have occasional downtime due to shared resources
Dedicated Uptime
- Great uptime for larger websites, such as e-commerce businesses and high-traffic sites
- One point of failure

Because the speed of your website is most often the number one concern among website developers and users when differentiating whether the cloud or a dedicated server, the short of it is, dedicated will usually be faster. It can be difficult to compare the VPS or dedicated environments because not all websites are optimized for speed and, front-end and backend development can come into play. In this instance, we are going to assume the code is sufficient for optimal performance. If we think of our restaurant analogy from earlier, resources (the wait staff) are limited in a Cloud environment. These resources get utilized by the website’s processes so it’s possible you may reach a limit that your Cloud Dedicated VPS can’t handle as fast as a dedicated server (although, there are some caching services you can implement to be more SEO competitive). Remember, resources for dedicated servers are all yours, and this equals out to a significant increase in speed.
Cloud Speed
- Average page load times
- Extra work needed to implement caching
Dedicated Speed
- Quicker website load times
- High-performance due to unshared resources