Dedicated Hosting vs. Shared Hosting

Posted by adfunk on March 5th, 2010 filed in Uncategorized

Whether you decide to use dedicated or shared web hosting will depend on your Personal or company’s individual requirements. The type and size of your company and what your website will be used for will affect which type of hosting you should go for. Websites vary in size and the amount of interactivity for the users. New websites often develop from simple static pages with information to fully interactive sites allowing users to perform tasks, log-in, download, upload and send emails. To choose the right web hosting, you should consider what your site is for and what it needs to be able to do, now and in the future.

Dedicated hosting services mean that your company will literally have its own server and all the space on it. All the connections going into the server will be your traffic alone and when any problems arise they are more likely to be resolved more quickly. For large companies with huge amounts of traffic then a dedicated server makes sense because the server can cope with a high number of visitors to your site at any one time and the website works more quickly. Dedicated servers for your website also mean that the server downtime will be a lot less, and ideally up and running 100% of the time. For a large website which has more interactivity, a dedicated server will provide a higher speed, less errors and better overall performance.

Shared web hosting servers often have a greater down-time, and all the connections will be shared with all of the other sites that it hosts. Errors and technical issues may take a long time to resolve and the slow connections or timing out of pages may send potential customers elsewhere. Shared web hosting can have its advantages though and will be the better option for some websites. The cost of shared web hosting is considerably less and there are also free services available for websites under a certain size.

For small and personal websites with little or no interactivity, shared hosting is by far the better option simply due to price and the ease that they can be set up. Shared web servers are also useful for new websites that may have limited traffic or are still under development. However, as a website grows, many medium sized businesses find that their sites soon don’t perform to the level they want it to, and so switching to a dedicated server makes sense.

Tags: Web Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Shared Hosting