Dedicated Web Hosting
Shared hosting is a wonderful and inexpensive starting point for a smaller websites that do not have great amount of traffic. With time your website can outgrow the constrains of a shared web hosting plan. At this the time you may consider to purchase a dedicated server as your hosting solution. Dedicated web hosting may cost you as much as $500 a month, and today many web hosting providers offer products called Virtual Private Servers or Virtual Servers. These products offer power and flexibility of a dedicated server yet at much lower price.
With virtual or shared web hosting, you don’t have a lot of flexibility or control over your web server that your hosting provider owns. The company providing shared web hosting services partitions a server to be shared between a number of customers for their websites and email. Because it is a shared server, the customers with virtual web hosting on the server share the hard drive, the processor, and the bandwidth as well as applications. The web host that provides the virtual hosting services has control over the server configurations.
You can expect your service to be much more reliable due to the fact that with dedicated server you do not share space with others. With shared hosting you may share space with 10 or even 100 other users. Not only do you share the hosting space but data transfer as well. If your average use of data transfer becomes more that 10% of allowed monthly transfer, you may be politely asked to close your account. While with dedicated hosting you are allowed to increase your data transfer if needed.
You should expect much better performance from dedicated web hosting solution. Your site should be faster since your are not sharing neither processor, disc space or data transfer with other users.
As no one else accesses your server you can be assured of a greater security, unless of course you are your own enemy. With dedicated web hosting solution you will have a dedicated or some call it “static” IP address. With shared hosting you share IP address with other users and traffic to your website is directed by the server after examining the “host header”. With dedicated server you can access your site with your IP address.
Conversely, a server providing shared web hosting contains multiple websites on the same computer but they all have the same IP address. If you were to type in an IP address associated with a shared server, you’d get an error message or possibly would be redirected to the hosting company’s main web site. So domain names are mandatory for websites hosted on shared servers as they are the only way to access those web sites – they cannot be accessed by an IP address alone as they can be with dedicated web hosting.
