Dedicated Servers or Shared Hosting?

Dedicated & Shared What?!?

Latte, Cappuccino, Espresso, like coffee, web hosting comes in different flavors and variants, diet and full fat. Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers or VPS and Dedicated.

Shared hosting, This is a technology in the web server to use “virtual hosts”. Virtual hosting is a one to many relationship, one server to many hosted websites. Every virtual host address is assigned to a different data space, each has its own hard drive space on the server. Not only does this share space but all resources of the server, for example, if both site A,B and C are located on a server each can only access at most 33% of the processor and memory if all simultaneously required 100% CPU.

One main advantage of shared hosting is its costs much much less. As a result you can get great features on shared hosting plans for less than £15.00 a month but may not offer the services or compromise security your system or application requires.

Dedicated hosting, When more reliability is required or complex processing a dedicated hosting plan is preferred. These websites in question are often SQL database driven, have content that needs to be updated frequently, takes up a lot of memory in servers, and needs maximum security.
This type of website hosting is highly configurable and more reliable than shared hosting but can cost in excess of £100 a month and up to tens of thousands.

So which web hosting package is right for you?

For most personal websites and small businesses shared hosting is more often than not the practical cost effective solution. Larger businesses will need to look into the more costly dedicated web hosting packages, both managed and in extream cases using third party consultancy to facilitate website specifications.