ENKI versus Shared Hosting

What's the difference between ENKI's services and shared hosting or control panel hosting that I can get for $15/mo?

ENKI's offering is geared towards supporting your business' success by partnering with you to provide the best value in an IT operations solution, rather than simply the lowest cost hosting.  Our enterprise-class services offer guaranteed speed and reliability by dedicating computing resources to your application and automatically repairing failed hardware. We also offer operations services plans that eliminate the need for you to hire IT operations staff or learn how to manage your solution.  You focus on what you do best... running your business!

When comparing ENKI to shared hosting, look for uptime guarantees, and how much CPU power, memory, and network bandwidth your provider is willing to promise you.

	Shared Hosting	ENKI VPS / Computing Utility VPDC Service
Reliability	Variable reliability with varying guarantees.  Shared hosting is always on a standalone server, so if it goes down, your site is down until the hardware is fixed - possibly days.   Most shared hosting can only achieve 99.9% uptime, which can be as much as 8 3/4 hours of downtime a year!	Packages offer 99.975% reliability or higher, max 5 minute downtime per incident, and higher.  10x money-back guarantee for unplanned outages exceeding the service level agreement of your package. Our 99.99% uptime guarantee plans keep total downtime to under 50 minutes a year.  We can do this because we have redundancy at all levels of our hardware and software.
Security	Usually not specified.  Some providers offer security scanning.  No hardware firewall or individually tailored firewall.  Shared hosting means that if one customer on a computer is infected with malware, all the customers will suffer performance problems, or worse.	Hardware Firewalls with optional Active Intrusion Detection/ Intrusion Prevention with antivirus available to protect against hacking, viruses and DOS attacks.  Custom firewall rules. Security scanning on request.
Speed/Power	Shared hosting may have hundreds of accounts/users on a single server, all competing for the server's power.  Note that differing packages may have different storage or features, but computing power is never specified since it can't be guaranteed.  As your hosted application starts to use more resources, it slows the entire shared server, and eventually the hosting provider has to turn you off in order to preserve its business.	You specify how much guaranteed computing power you need, adjustable at any time.  You aren't sharing that power with anyone else.  You only pay for the amount of computing power you have used each month.  Need more?  It's available, without limit.
Disk Storage	Packages typically include disk storage measured in Megabytes.  You pay for all of the storage even if you don't use it.	You pay only for what you use, starting at $0.20 per Gigabyte per month.  Our low prices often save you more than the cost of a shared hosting package alone!
Bandwidth	Packages include a limited amount of bandwidth, with very steep overage rates.  You pay for all the bandwidth even if you don't use it.  Many providers charge for both incoming and outgoing bandwidth.  There is no guarantee of the quality of the bandwidth (ping time or throughput.)	You pay only for what you use, and only the maximum of your incoming and outgoing bandwidth.  We measure bandwidth in Gigabytes, not Megabytes.  Our low prices often save you more than the cost of a shared hosting package alone!  ENKI has top quality, low-ping-time bandwidth delivered from multiple sources.
Flexibility	You have to use a particular software system, typically LAMP.  You are limited as to the software applications you can install into your hosting account.	Use any operating system, including Windows, and any application software you choose.  Need a complex virtual data center to run a custom application?  No problem!  We can provision it in minutes.
Support	At shared-hosting prices, vendors can't afford to give you more than a few minutes' time a month to answer your questions, or they're going to lose money on you.  You're on your own in setting up and deploying your application - especially if it is unique or custom.  They may give you a "control panel" to make setting standard applications up easy, but if you try to do anything out of the ordinary, you're on your own.	ENKI offers basic support that ensures your services stay running, with additional operations service packages that completely eliminate the need for you to manage your installation.  We offer 24x7x365 support with maximum 1-hour response for your mission-critical applications.
Intended Audience	Small businesses with web sites requiring minimal computing resources, where budget is an overriding concern, and cost is more important than uptime or performance.	Companies requiring enterprise-grade guaranteed service levels without additional staffing investment.  Users of applications that have rapidly varying resource requirements.  Organizations looking for a cost-effective alternative to building a private colocated data center.  Companies valuing uptime or performance.