Shared Hosting Vs Dedicated Hosting

The Internet is a platform for every business to make its presence felt. In order to maintain a website online, a web service provider needs to be contacted for web hosting. Now you need to make a choice regarding shared hosting vs dedicated hosting. It would be impossible for a company to make this choice in haste, and they need to consider a lot of things before they finally take a call.

What Is Shared Hosting?
Also known as virtual hosting, it occurs when you dish out a monthly fee to a third-party service provider in order to use their equipment for your web server. The service provider handles everything ranging from backup and security to setting up the server and managing the bandwidth. The sole task of your company in such a scenario will simply be website content development.

In the case of shared hosting, you share your server with multiple web servers. As a result of that, you end up sharing the server where your website is placed, with many other websites. This has various pros and cons, but the biggest disadvantage of this system is the fact that you end up sharing many resources over the server. It is possible that the traffic on your website could get affected by the traffic on the other websites on your server.

Features of Shared Hosting
Sharing the IP Address: Since you are sharing the server with other websites, you will obviously have the same IP address as them. If these other websites happen to be blacklisted for spamming or some other illegal activity, you would suffer the consequences as a result. To avoid such a scenario, you should choose your web host responsibly, as they would subsequently suspend the sites that perform illegal activities.

Greater Response Time : If there are two or more websites on the same server, it goes without saying that the response time for each individual website would be longer. This will make the visitors to your website wait longer and they might not wish to visit your website again.

Server Crashes Often: In many cases, if the server host does not monitor the server activities properly, the server will get overloaded and crash. This occurs more frequently in shared hosting vis-a-vis dedicated hosting. Choosing a web host that is reliable and well-known will help you avoid such situations.

Cost-effective: The most important benefit is the cost factor. Since you are sharing the server with other websites, it is pretty economical. Also the maintenance and monitoring of the server is not your responsibility, so you do not have to divert resources towards that purpose.

Hardware and Security: As with any web based activity, good security is essential. This is handled by the service provider and you need not worry about it. The web host also provides the required hardware, so you do not have invest any money there. Learn some more pros and cons of cheap web hosting.

What Is Dedicated Hosting?
As opposed to shared server hosting, dedicated server hosting carries greater efficiency, provides more security and entails lesser problems. Dedicated web hosting service is mostly used by big corporations and businesses that see a large amount of traffic. Dedicated hosting service simply means that your web server sits on its own box which is partly managed by the service provider. It is the complete opposite of shared server hosting, and means that the server is entirely dedicated to your needs and web traffic alone.

Features of Dedicated Hosting
Faster Response: Since the server is solely dedicated to your website alone, the response time will be much faster as there are smaller lines that the visitors have to wait in. This helps to maintain the level of traffic on your website.

No Bandwidth Restrictions: On shared server hosting, each website has a limit for their bandwidth and this limit cannot be crossed. This is not applicable as far as dedicated server hosting is concerned. The entire bandwidth available on the server lies at your disposal.

Greater Control: In this case, you are the boss. Nobody’s activities can harm the functioning of your website. You are free to install any application and you can also carry out script testing as regularly as you want. You’re given much more freedom in this situation, as running your website smoothly is entirely (or almost entirely) your own responsibility now.

Higher Cost: Since you are monitoring and regulating the server yourself, the costs incurred by you will be greater. You will have to invest more on hardware and security and regularly carry out maintenance checks. As a result of all this, the price will go up and due to this very fact, dedicated server hosting is chosen only by big web-based companies, social networking sites or large corporations.

Greater Security: As compared to shared hosting, you can achieve greater levels of security in dedicated hosting. Again, this stems from the fact that you are in control of the security measures and you can adopt whatever means that you find appropriate and necessary. The web host will also provide you with backups in this case.

Final Choice
Now that the difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting is clear, the question is which is better. The truth of the matter is that you cannot say that one of these methods is better than the other one. You can only decide which method is more suitable to you and your business needs. The size of your company will also help you determine if you should opt for either.

Dedicated hosting obviously gives you more freedom and resources but it comes at a higher price. This is a good option only if your business can sustain the payment of the high fees. The nature of your business will also help you choose between the two. In general circumstances, a company first chooses shared server hosting, and as their needs and operations expand over time, they switch over to dedicated server hosting.