When you have your application or internet shop completed, the last and the most important thing is to deploy your application to the server. You can do it using different pages that share hosting features or server spaces. In today’s article we would like to give you some insights about the pros and cons of each of them and help you choose the best fitted option.
Differences between server and hosting
A server is a physical machine which contains separate spaces available for specific resources, including those transferred to subsequent clients, such as web hosting, mail hosting, etc. One server may contain data of many clients. In this case, we talk about the concept of shared hosting. Private server may contain more than one application which can consist of separate programs, sites or work together like a big business app. Having your own machine allows you to configure all features starting from the operating system and finishing up with security settings.
Hosting, on the other hand, is a separate part of the server power and capacity. Multiple hosts on a single server create so-called shared hosting. The whole mechanism behaves like a multi-family house, so all its users draw from the resources of one server which can be expanded but is still limited by parameters. Users and their behavior can influence other users but they can always count on the support of the administrator who still manages the whole server.
How to choose best fitted solution for your shop
Users who expect full control over their space, use the services of an exclusive server, such as a dedicated server. This way, they depend on their needs and available resources, create space, and give it adequate computing power. It’s dependent only upon the power and the internet provider. Subcontractors’ or user’s skills can help manage the server’s services. The owner is the administrator, but he can still use the help of other service providers. Server is a more expensive option than hosting, but gives a better option for scalability and allows you to set up an environment specifically for your application. If you can handle administration tasks on your own, this solution should be better.
On the other hand, we also have shared hosting services – they are cheap and popular. A client who starts building his presence on the internet, usually does not know how big his application will be. Shared hosting offers many packets which can be upgraded to better performance plans expanding its capacity and calculation power. What’s unfortunate about this solution is that hosting plans have limited resources when you hit maximum performance limit. It would be a better option to change your service to dedicated server or server in cloud (VPS).
Recommended solution for enterprise class e-shop
Virtual private server in cloud
Most recommended services are the solutions from Azure. Its virtual machines allow you to configure continuous deployment, support windows and Linux platforms, have built-in autoscale and load balancing features. It helps you monitor your budget, gives unlimited opportunity to scale up your machine, encrypt sensitive data, protect the server from malicious threats, and secure network traffic.
Second most renowned one is cloud platform based on AWS (Amazon Web Services). It’s quite similar to Azure. Its sample service which we can use to deploy and host the application is AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It’s easy for deploying and scaling web apps and automatically handles the deployment process from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. It’s important to know that it can scale the application up and down based on its workload. This feature minimizes costs of virtual machines.
Hostings
Recommended hostings for nopCommerce internet shops can be found on the official site.
If you want to choose a good hosting provider, it’s important to know the price, performance, bandwidth, processing power, security, backups, certificates support, and up-time. Hosting nopCommerce additionally requires windows-based hosting providers which support ASP.Net Core and database SQL Server or MySQL.
nopCommerce server requirements
All applications that run on computers have their hardware and software requirements. It’s similar when we deploy an application on a server. Programs need specific resources to work correctly. We can often see that, after completed deployment, an internet shop doesn’t use much resources, but when it comes to rush hours, the server can be loaded up to 100%.
nopCommerce provides information about technology and system requirements, which need to be fulfilled.
If you are looking for the best solution for your nopCommerce store, we will gladly provide you with our recommendations.