Shared Hosting or Dedicated Hosting?
Shared hosting also known as Virtual hosting is one where your hosting company hosts lot of websites on one Server. By the name itself you can think that in shared hosting server space is shared between many users. Depending upon the number of people who share a server, the price and quality of shared hosting varies a lot. In semi-shared hosting, a server is shared between as low as 10 to 25 websites. In a true shared or virtual hosting environment, the number of websites hosted on a single server can vary from 500 to 3000, depending upon the server configuration.
In dedicated hosting, your site alone is hosted on server, you own all the space on the web server and space is not shared with any other user. The whole server is dedicated to your sites.
Shared versus (vs) Dedicated Hosting
Shared Web hosting
Shared hosting is cheap where as dedicated hosting is costly. The reason for this is more than obvious – if you take the whole server, you pay the whole price; if you take a small part of a server, you only pay a part of the cost of server and the services running on the server. You must have seen offers where hosting company provides you hosting as low as $5 (even Rs. 100 per month in India) per month, this is shared hosting. Where as dedicated hosting costs you more than $75 per month (Rs 5000 to 25000 per month in India).
Most of the people go with shared hosting as it is cheap in comparison to dedicated hosting. But make sure you’re aware of potential problems:
- Shared hosting plans generally limit the amount of disk space and data transfer (bandwidth) that are available for your site. While this allows for cost-effective hosting, there is a downside.Websites utilizing a shared hosting solution run on a server with other domains, all of which are using the same system resources (RAM, CPU, Harddisk etc) So if you have a high traffic website, you your website may not be able to support a large number of simultaneous visitors due to the lack of system resources available.
- Sharing an IP address with spam sites or adult sites raises a warning flag with search engines. Spam sites try to trick search engines into giving them an undeserved high rank, so some search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live etc respond by banning the entire IP address from their index. Check your Web host’s terms of service page to see what sites are allowed on their servers. Also ask if they offer an individual IP address for different sites on the same server.
- Slower server response time. A server receives requests for files and serves up those files in the order the requests are received. In a shared hosting environment, the requests come in for hundreds of websites at the same time and the server processes them in the order in which it receives them. Ask your host how many sites reside on each server and how much traffic those sites get. The sheer number of sites isn’t the only issue. Response time may be slower if you share space with 100 busy sites than if you share a server with 250 sites that only get a few hits per day.Slow server response can hurt site loyalty, traffic and business by frustrating visitors. Find out the IP address of the server you’ll share and use online Server Check tools to monitor the server and verify its response time.
- More server crashes. Most Web hosts strictly limit the type of CGI scripts allowed on their servers, and with good reason! A poorly-written CGI script can quickly run wild and consume most of the server’s resources, even crashing it. Your site could be slowed or brought down entirely due to the action of a neighboring site.
Don’t get scared by these concerns. The overwhelming number of Web sites use shared or virtual hosting and never experience any problems. Just evaluate the host carefully before you sign up for an account.
On the other hand, with a shared hosting package there is no need for a server administrator to setup, constantly monitor and secure your server, nor do you need to worry about security. Shared hosting is most recommended for small to medium-sized web sites that do not require lot of custom programs or installations.
Dedicated web hosting
A dedicated server gives the client the necessary flexibility to host multiple sites on one machine, while deploying sophisticated applications (sql databases, audio and video streaming media, high-end email solutions, etc). Dedicated servers offer scalability, giving you the room to accommodate additional visitors to your site as it gains popularity, while at the same time allowing you more room to enrich and expand the site itself. Finally, dedicated servers provide greater performance reliability because dedicated web hosting gives you exclusive server access and total manageability and control over your own site and machine.
Dedicated hosting is ideal for websites with high traffic and large businesses who want complete control over the server so they can fine tune for special shopping cart software, etc. Another benefit of dedicated hosting is you can resell the space/bandwidth to people who want to setup their own website. If your website is critical to your business, then dedicated web hosting is highly recommend.
The benefits of dedicated server hosting are:
- More control: You don’t have to worry about someone’s bad script slowing or crashing the server.
- Faster response time even with high traffic loads –> satisfied visitors, repeat visitors, greater revenue!
- Easier setups. It’s easier to set up the server to handle anonymous FTP and SSL encryption if the server has a dedicated IP address.
- No bandwidth penalty. Virtual hosting accounts usually offer a certain amount of bandwidth per month to each site on the server. Sites that go over their allotment get charged extra. But dedicated hosting generally has no such restrictions because it’s assumed you need a lot of bandwidth if you require your own server.
Those are great benefits, but they usually don’t justify the extra cost for smaller sites. Evaluate your needs and your financial resources before you sign up for hosting and choose your host carefully.
Semi-Dedicated Hosting
Semi-Dedicated Hosting is basically dedicated hosting, except the server is shared between a very limited number of users. This may sound like virtual hosting but there are some differences and benefits. Firstly, the number of users per server is kept to a bare minimum, between 2-25 depending on the traffic and resource usage. Secondly, each user on a semi-dedicated server has usually the same tech support as he would on a dedicated server. This means that your hosting company will tweak everything exactly to your liking, including installing libraries, additional software, tweaking settings on Apache, PHP etc. Basically removing the limitations that are imposed by the virtual hosting control panel when it comes to making the server run exactly how you want it.
Semi-Dedicated Hosting is for users that want more power than virtual (shared) accounts often offer, but do not need the resources of a full dedicated server. A semi-dedicated hosting can bring the cost down while giving the joy of dedicated hosting. By going with a semi-dedicated server they will be on a machine where they have access to a large portion of the resources, allowing them to run more traffic intensive websites as well as more complex scripts and software.
Analyzing Your Web hosting Needs
Linux hosting accounts are currently the most popular alternatives for anyone wishing to start a website or a blog. Nearly all internet hosting companies offer Linux hosted solutions with prices varying considerably depending on the host, server hardware and the specifications offered by each individual package. Most affordable solutions cost only a few dollars (few hundres Rupees) per month and these offer all the requirements anyone wanting to start a small or medium sized website will need. For more complex and feature rich options, a dedicated Linux server is definitely the best alternative.
If you don’t know whether Linux hosting is the right option for you there are a few pointers that could help in the assessment process. Many popular scripts are developed specifically or work better on Linux servers. Examples of such scripts include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OsCommerce and phpBB to mention only a few. These scripts are mostly developed using the PHP scripting language with MySQL database, which performs exceptionally better on Linux servers and thus explaining why most people will prefer to use Linux based hosting services.
Windows hosting solutions provide basically the same functions as their Linux counterpart except when utilizing ASP and ASP.Net that is exclusively native to Windows. Another aspect worth mentioning about Windows servers is that they are the only alternative that can run the Visual Basic and the VB Scripting language. In reality both alternatives work exceptionally well when used in distinct ways, making it very hard to determine which alternative is superior to the other, even if such a comparison is possible. When uncertain on which solution to opt for, the best practice is to research the requirements needed to host the site and only purchase the hosting account when all the details have been gathered.
Choosing Between a Dedicated Server and Shared Hosting
Once you have decided the platform, you need to decide the resources that you will need. Most people just starting their websites can do very well with shared hosting. But if you are a big corporate, or plan to run a media rich website like gaming, video and audio streaming or social networking, then a dedicated server will be the right choice for you to start your online presence. So remember, the hosting environment that will work for you will entirely depend upon the kind of website that you are planning to run, your budget and other requirements. If you are a start-up, have a small website or personal homepage, traffic anything less than 1000 unique visitors a day – shared hosting will work for you in most cases. If you are aiming for high traffic, high bandwidth usage or media rich site – go for dedicated hosting!