You are new to this web hosting world and you have just made your first website. Now as you are searching for a web host to host the site, you came across two types of web host – shared and dedicated. And this confuses you further; what differentiates these two and which one you should choose?
Basically what separates these plans is that how the server is used. For a shared plan, as the name points out, you are actually sharing your server with many other websites that are using the same plan. This means you have to share the bandwidth and other web resources with the websites on the server. Dedicated plan on the other have gives the lease gets full ownership of the server.
There are more to these plans that the definition above. The details will be discussed below.
First and foremost let us go into shared plan. The main highlight of the plan is its price. As you are sharing the hosted resources as well as the running costs incurred with hundreds of other websites it brings down your monthly rental fee. This in turn makes it affordable. Because of high competition in this niche you can really get good bargains in terms of web space and bandwidth.
Besides, shared web host solutions have a ‘what you see what you get interface’ or WYSIWYG which can be really user friendly. Most of the web hosts provide Graphical User Interface (GUI) such as windows which allows you to upload and delete files easily. Besides that the GUI also gives easy access to webmaster tools such as site visitors statistics.
Last but not least shared web hosting plans are fast, wastage free and easy to maintained. You can focus more on building your website as shared web hosting plans are maintained by web professionals. As you will only use what your website needs you tend to have less wastage of web resources unlike dedicated web server host. Just in case you have reached your web plan limit, you can always purchase more.
Moving on to dedicated host plan, the main advantage of using dedicated host plan is that you get to control what is uploaded into your server entirely as you do not have to share the resources with hundreds of other websites. This means you can have all the web resources at your disposal. This plan is ideal for high traffic websites. As dedicated web hosts usually offer unlimited bandwidth, it is a better choice if your website attracts heavy traffics.
Dedicated servers would not have the risk of being blocked by search engines as shared servers do. This is because dedicated servers have their own unique Internet Protocol or IP addresses. Shared server on the other hand has to share it’s IP addresses among all the other websites in it. Therefore if one of the websites are carrying out illegal activities such spamming and so on the entire server will get blacklisted and so your website will be blocked or listed as ‘high risk’ site.
In summary, before deciding which plan to choose consider your web site’s basic need. Whether it will need all time high bandwidth, or will it consume a lot of web space. Do not forget that growth impact of your website over time. Do a rough forecast of how much of web resources such as memory, web space and bandwidth that your website is likely to use with time.
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Kalen is a full time webmaster and writer. She starts her career as web developer after college and for years she has accumulated valuable experience on picking a web host. Do read her findings on hosting providers.