Dedicated or Shared Hosting?

The internet is still the fastest growing business platform to date, it offers so many opportunities whilst at the same time leveling the playing field for everybody. With our weakening economy, more and more people are looking to the internet as a means to solve their financial woes; either by creating blogs to supplement their salaries or building full scale businesses. Many hosting providers are taking advantage of this, and are popping up all over the place, left, right and center! How do you know who’s in it for the quick buck, and who's there to genuinely help you succeed?

Firstly, you need to know the requirements of the website you are going to be creating. There are so many aspects that go into play with each and every website, careful planning ahead leads to far fewer headaches down the road. The size, and bandwidth requirements of your website are one of the most important aspects to consider. Is your website going to take the role of a social website, with many people accessing and updating large volumes of data, or would it primarily remain a static brochure type website? Depending on the scale, there are two different routes that you could end up taking, and these are shared hosting and dedicated hosting each with their own strengths and pitfalls.

more and more people are looking to the internet as a means to solve their financial woes

What is shared hosting?

Basically shared hosting was created to bring down the exorbitant costs of hosting. Shared hosting is also commonly referred to as virtual hosting as it allows more than one person to host their website on a server. Therefore the costs can be split up depending on how many people are sharing the server, and it usually ends up being a fraction of what you would pay for a dedicated server.

So what are the drawbacks? Many unscrupulous hosts have been known to over share their servers, trying to squeeze as much out of their server as they possible can. This is commonly referred to crowding and has a very negative effect on uptime and performance. Servers that are crowded are always being pushed beyond what they were designed for, making hardware failure and therefore downtime very likely.

We thoroughly test and recheck our hosts performance and uptime, to make sure that they will offer you the best there is in the industry. All the hosts on our list have guidelines to ensure that their users do not abuse their servers, and have procedures in place to make sure this doesn’t happen. What this means for you is that your website will continue to run unhindered at it’s performance performance.

Dedicated hosting?

Dedicated hosting as you may have gathered is not shared amongst other users. You have complete control over the server, and may do with it as you wish. You can install your own control panel, software and plugins. Obviously this flexibility comes at a price, and is often far out of reach for the average person. Costs include hardware, manageing of the server license fees, and the list goes on. The cost for dedicated hosting can sore into thousands of dollars.

The advantages of dedicated hosting are usually only seen if you have a large amount of traffic accessing your website. The server can commit all it’s resources to one website, making sure that it performs optimally. Websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Youtube have millions of people accessing their servers all the time, and cannot afford downtime due to such demands. Generally the average website does not generate this much traffic to warrant getting a dedicated server.

Which option?

So out of the two, which option is best going to suite your websites needs? With todays advances in technology, with multicore CPUs, large amounts of RAM and hard disk space and the ever spiraling down prices of hardware. Web hosts are able to pack continuously more and more power into everyone of their servers making shared hosting a very suitable option for most websites. Obviously there will always be room for dedicated hosting for much larger scaled websites. But when it comes down to price, and comparing the two, there is no better value than shared hosting.