Shared, Dedicated or Virtual hosting, Which is best for you?

Shared, Dedicated or Virtual hosting, Which is best for you?

When you first step into the world of hosting a web site, there are a lot of big technical terms that get thrown around. Three of these terms are Shared Hosting, Dedicated hosting and Virtual hosting. We will walk you through what these terms mean and how they can benefit you as a webmaster.

There are three main types of web hosting out there right now. They are Shared hosting, Virtual hosting, and Dedicated hosting. There is also a fourth option known as a cloud computing but that is beyond the scope of what we are talking about in this article. These three hosting options are great for what they do and should be looked at as the level of hosting steps that you need to walk through in your life as a webmaster. The steps start as Shared being the beginner, Virtual being the intermediate, and Dedicated being the graduate level of hosting.

Shared hosting is when you are on a server populated with other web sites and you share immediate resources. You are on the same hard drive as the other web sites separated only by a folder name. You do not notice the other sites and most of the time will not have any idea of who they are. You will log into CPanel and only your web site information will be presented. This is good for most small to medium web sites but you can run into problems. When you are on a shared host your site can affected by another person’s site. This means that if they are using too many resources, they will slow their’s and your site down. Most hosting providers are good at watching out for this problem. There are a few more kinks but overall shared hosting is a fine solution for a small to medium site.

Dedicated hosting is having one server all by yourself. You can place one or several web sites on a dedicated host but the difference between this and shared hosting environment is that they are all controlled by you. This means that you can allocate more resources and bandwidth to each site as how you see fit. Also you can have managed and non-managed dedicated hosting packages. Managed hosting means that they take care of all the server plumbing that will be needed such as updates and server configurations. Non-managed hosting means that you will have to take care of this yourself. There is a downside to having a Dedicated server. For example if you are going to have managed hosting, then the cost can jump up significantly higher than for non-managed hosting. Non-managed hosting takes a high degree of technical know how and can be a steep learning process for a new person. Also Dedicated servers, in general, are more expensive than other hosting options.

Virtual hosting is the best of both worlds when it comes to making a decision about hosting. You are separated, virtually, from your neighbors on the server and at the same time the cost is less prohibitive than on a Dedicated server. With a virtual server you get a certain amount of allocated resources and you get your own OS environment to work with. This means that you do not have to go with the default configuration policies set up by the web host provider. Your site believes that it is on it’s own server. The downsides of a virtual server is that your resources are still limited but nowhere to the degree as on a shared hosting set up.

You now see the differences between the three types of hosting that are out there. See which one suits the needs of your new site best.