Shared vs Dedicated Web Hosting

Posted in Featured Article on Apr 1st, 2010 |

Web hosting services has increasingly becoming one of the hottest growing industries in the society today. Today, people setup their website for both personal and online business purpose. It is compulsory for everyone with a website to have a web hosting platform to run on. There are two major types of web hosting today: shared hosting and dedicated hosting. We need to be able to tell the differences between them before deciding on which type of web hosting works best for one.

What is a dedicated hosting?

Dedicated hosting refers to the hosting plan which involved an exclusive use of a web server; where the entire server is used by only single website (or customer). Dedicated hosting users get full control over the server including bandwidth allocation, server operating system, and other custom web server features.

What is a shared hosting?

As the name refers, a shared hosting server is shared by multiple websites. Typically, websites on a shared hosting share the same server resources (such as CPU and RAM) and IP address.

Six Essential Differences Between Shared and Dedicated Hosting

1. Hosting Costs

Shared hosting is widely used because of its competitive price – which makes it affordable for most people. A dedicated hosting is far more expensive as compared to the shared hosting because of the enhanced features and services which are offered.

2. Server Security

For a shared hosting, you have to share the same server with many other users, if any of them is caught engaged in spam activities or contain pornographic elements, the whole IP address will be black-listed by the search engines. On the other hand, as dedicated hosting is exclusively for you, no one can access your website without your consensus.

For businesses which require high security control on their data and information such as the banking industry, foreign exchange service provider, insurance companies, dedicated hosting is undoubtedly the best choice.

3. Web Host Reliability

While both web hosting services are equipped with satisfying up-time performance, nonetheless dedicated hosting is the most reliable as they are confident in guaranteeing high up-time availability with at least 99.95% annually. This is largely contributed by the exclusive control and ownership of the dedicated user.

4. Web Host Performance

With dedicated web hosting, user can anticipate for faster processing speed and larger bandwidth with disk space as their resources is exclusively owned by one user. Instead, with shared web hosting, as users need to share among those residing on the same server. The performance and efficiency of the shared server is largely influenced by the discipline and honesty of their web-users in most cases.

5. Flexibility

Both are equipped with different features and benefits. Nevertheless, on a shared hosting, the features provided are more fundamental inclined. In contrary, user on a dedicated hosting has complete freedom in customizing any features or applications that he wanted to.

6. IP address

Dedicated hosting provider will assign unique IP address for their user which serves like a membership number to identify a particular individual. Only the owner of this IP address is accessible into the designated dedicated server. While for shared hosting, all the users on the shared server will be sharing the same IP address and individualism is very low for shared hosting.