Shared Hosting vs. Dedicated Hosting

There are numerous types of web hosting available, something that is growing all the time. But these can be broken down into two main categories, shared hosting and dedicated hosting. This article looks at some of the benefits of both of these.

Shared Hosting

There is one obvious benefit that shared hosting has over dedicated hosting – it is cheaper, and significantly so. Large cost savings can be made and a website can be hosted very cheaply. The reason for the price difference is that it is not only one person or business paying for the server, but the hosting companies other customers (who are sharing the server) are sharing the cost.

There are different shared packages available, and the prices vary. So how much you pay depends on which features are needed for the site and how this affects the hosting.

The cost, or rather the lack of cost, is the only real benefit of shared hosting, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good option. If it meets the websites requirements then there is nothing wrong with it and there is no point in spending extra money if more expensive hosting is not necessary.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is generally much more advanced than shared hosting. It does vary greatly, though, depending on the service that is required. It is obviously more expensive but if a website requires dedicated hosting then it is certainly worth the extra cost.

Having a dedicated server is much more secure than sharing it with other websites. So if security is a concern then dedicated hosting is the way to go. Having its own server means security is much easier to maintain. This makes dedicated hosting necessary for sites with confidential information or sites that payment transactions go through, for example ecommerce sites.

There is significantly more bandwidth and disk space with dedicated hosting, although how much depends on the package chosen. This means that a website can be larger with more pages. It can also cope with large files such as video, and audio and with more visitors. So for large sites or those that are likely to have a high amount of traffic, dedicated hosting is required.

There are many more options with dedicated hosting. Customers can go for managed hosting, meaning the hosting is managed by the hosting company, or unmanaged hosting, where they manage it themselves. There is also the option of running your own server, meaning a choice has to be made between colocation and hosting your own server. With colocation, the hosting client owns their server but hosts it at a data centre, by renting rackspace where the server is stored. The alternative is to host it at their own premises.

So although there are different options with shared hosting, the options are much wider if choosing dedicated hosting. It all comes down to whether or not dedicated hosting is necessary or whether shared hosting is adequate. For most businesses dedicated hosting will be required but there are exceptions.

Andrew Marshall (c)