Shared And Dedicated Web Hosting. Which One To Choose?

Your website is a collection of text, images, audio, and video files. It needs a space to be stored online. This space is known as web hosting.

Many different types of web hosting services exist out there. Here I will take a look at two most important of them. They are shared and dedicated web hosting.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the cheapest web hosting option available to website owners. If you are using this type of hosting your server is actually one of many server programs that are all run on a single piece of hardware. You will be sharing physical resources with other clients and the servers of those other clients are also inhabited on the same machine.

Therefore the total cost of hardware, bandwidth and maintenance is spread out amongst all of the host clients. But on the other hand it also means that each client will only get a portion of the power and speed of the server which can result in poor performance if one or more than one of the clients begins to use more resources.

This implies that suppose your website which is hosted on a shared server begins attracting a lot of visitors which are far more than what it was attracting normally, the performance of the other websites on the server will get affected. And hence the server administrators may temporarily deactivate your website to reduce the strain on the server and the negative impacts it was having on other websites stored on the same machine.

If you’re considering shared web hosting, check out our review of the top two shared hosting companies here.

Dedicated web hosting

Dedicated web hosting comes with many benefits that you won’t receive with shared web hosting but they have one major drawback – the high costs involved.

Even if you choose a moderately-priced dedicated web hosting pack it will cost you at least $99 per month. If you also want extra services like management, technical support, a firewall or upgradation to a more powerful server, the prices can rise even further. A powerful, fully-configured, managed and serviced dedicated web server will usually cost you more than $1,000 a month!

Why pay so much? Is it really worth it? Let me explain.

The greatest benefits of dedicated hosting are increased speed of the website, the site becomes more secure, more reliable, and it gives you more control. Because you won’t be sharing resources with other clients you will not have to worry about their websites slowing down your website’s speed and degrading the user experience of your site visitors.

Additionally because the server will not be splitting among multiple clients the chances of your site experiencing a critical failure are quite less.

I hope this article would have given you a good introduction on shared and dedicated web hosting. On which web host is your site hosted? Let me know in the comments below.