Shared vs dedicated web hosting

There are two basic types of web hosting packages - shared and dedicated. How to choose an appropriate type of hosting for your website?

Websites are stored on servers - special network computers responding to data requests over the Internet. Every server has its own Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is four numbers separated by dots - 123.456.78.9.

A website that uses dedicated hosting has the server all to itself. All the server resources and its IP address are unique to that website. Shared hosting, on the other hand, places several websites on the same server, all of them sharing resources and the same IP address.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is much cheaper than dedicated hosting because the cost of operating the server is split between many different customers.

With shared hosting websites hosted on a single server share all the resources of that computer such as disk space, bandwidth and the IP address.

To provide adequate service to all websites on a server, your host limits each site to a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth used per month.

Every server has a limited amount of bandwidth and the amount of traffic your neighbours receive can affect how quickly your website is displayed. Each request coming in to the server is dealt with in the order it was received.

The amount of traffic each site receives is more important than the number of websites sharing a particular server. A server hosting 100 low-traffic websites will respond much faster than one which has 50 websites with many visitors.

Some of the risks associated with shared hosting are:

• a badly programmed script running on one of the websites could affect the entire server by consuming many of its resources;
• if one of the websites is banned from the search engines (for spamming tactics, for example) it could affect everyone sharing that IP address.

To avoid these issues check your hosting company's policy about third-party scripts and inappropriate activity. Most hosting companies have very strict policies on this matter.

Check out our recommendations for shared hosting packages.

Dedicated hosting

All resources of a dedicated server are yours to use as you like at all times. You can use it to host a single or multiple websites. You have access to the full bandwidth and disk space of the server.

Large complex websites with a lot of traffic need to have dedicated hosting. Sites that use a dedicated server are also free to run any kind of scripts. This may be ideal for scripts developers who need to test them without affecting other websites.

Read our suggestions on dedicated server hosting.

How to choose

Small websites are usually better off with shared hosting because of its affordability. A reputable host will be careful not to allow activities that could jeopardize your site.

On the other hand, if you have large complex websites that receive over 1000 visitors a day, you should consider using dedicated hosting. Dedicated server is also a good choice for developers who wish to experiment with new Internet technologies.

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