Should you own a medium-sized company, choosing the right web hosting plan may be a big challenge. You might get confused to decide whether to opt for a shared hosting program or a dedicated web hosting program. At the start of your company, it is somehow harder to determine between your current and future demand. Additionally, the “Unlimited Everything” insanity of each web host may make things much more worst.
A comparison between Shared and Dedicated web hosting.
In the following article, I’ll discuss the crucial differences between shared web hosting and dedicated web hosting plans to make it easier for you to take the right decision.
Let’s begin with a brief introduction of dedicated and shared hosting services before we jump into the comparison.
Shared hosting is a service where a hosting server is shared among thousands of other sites running on the exact same server and completing for tools like memory and bandwidth. Web hosts give you a management panel with management tools to manage your site whereas hosting is directly managed by the net host itself.
Since it is very inexpensive, it might not be very great. Allow me to clarify further why.
Imagine how a shared web host is configured? It is a computer with resources like hard drive space, CPU speed, and RAM. The host puts many consumers on a single server — by the large number I mean, it can be over 2,000 users. Each user may have a number of websites so that one server hosts somewhere around 6,000 websites.
The problem is that these sites all share the host’s resources. If one website gets some buggy code or simply receives a lot of traffic it could eat 80% of a host’s memory let us assume, which means that another 5,999 websites are left with just 20 percent of the total RAM.
Dedicated Hosting — Fast but Expensive
Here is the hosting service which nullifies all the issues of shared web hosting because you are all alone on a host. This provides a trusted host that may serve a substantial number of daily visitors without screwing up. There are different ways to achieve the resources’ dedication. In VPS hosting support, a specific section of a server with fixed resources is put aside for you so that it provides you a “feeling” just like a dedicated server despite the fact that it is actually shared.
Since you get a computer all yours, many committed hosting companies allow you to customize it sizable. You may be able to decide on the quantity and kind of memory, the OS to install, and other hardware components that make up a computer. This provides you with a great deal of flexibility which might be required to run some specialized software.
However, it’s few drawbacks. First, you need to understand quite a lot about computers and host technologies. Although there are managed dedicated hosting solutions you will still need to do more on your own. Second, you might get an entirely unmanaged host where you’d even need to install the OS yourself, all of the tools needed to conduct a web server, security scanning, malware removal, and so forth. I would not say this a drawback, but it’s something which you want to understand up front before buying such a strategy.
What is the Difference afterward?
Now, we’ve got a fair comprehension of what is shared web hosting and what’s dedicated hosting. Let us look to the specifics of how these plans differ based on performance, security, bandwidth & disk space, price, etc..
1. Sites Hosted
Shared Hosting: With a shared hosting plan, there may be hundreds of other sites that are hosted on precisely the same server along with your website. The server resources can also be shared among all the hosted websites.
Dedicated Hosting: Since a committed hosting plan includes no other site which is sharing tools with your site (s), you’ve got the freedom to use those tools as per your requirements. You may want to host your multiple websites on precisely the same server.
2. Bandwidth & Disk Space
Few web hosts may cost you additional money if you transcend the allotted limits. Be aware that many hosting companies advertise their shared hosting programs with the “Unlimited Everything” promoting tag. But the truth is that it consistently has limits. You can’t use the”Unlimited” bandwidth and disk space in one go. But just internet host gets to determine how much that number should be! I would counsel to ask your hosting company concerning the “soft limit” and make your decision based on the volume of the traffic you are expecting to receive and the disk space needed.
Dedicated Hosting: when you’ve got a website or blog that gets a massive quantity of visitors, dedicated hosting is the best available choice. There are not very many web host that actually offers unlimited bandwidth and disc space.
3. Performance
The greater the functioning of your site, the better will be your customers’ consumer experience. Server performance and response time should be the important parameters to decide which hosting plan suits you the most. Together with the evolution of search engine — such as Google Search, Bing, etc. — calculations, site answer time is quite crucial in search engine rank. Google attaches high importance to server response times in making decisions to demonstrate the first-page search results.
Shared Hosting: Since a shared hosting plan has restricted shared resources, you’ll never be able to be certain of your website or website performance. Imagine a situation where your blog receives an average number of traffic every day. Another website administrator on the same shared server conducts an aggressive advertising campaign and experiences that a massive surge from the traffic. In this situation, the shared host will use most of its resources to deal with that user’s traffic, thus affecting the performance of your site.
The best result is that your site will take a longer time to load, resulting in annoyance to your thousands and thousands of traffic. This situation can be reversed, if your website traffic spike unprecedentedly, it might slow down the other customers’ websites. In the worst situation, some shared hosting suppliers may even punish you or may charge you more for using additional bandwidth.
The server tools are completely devoted to your site (s) and you can increase your traffic as you need with no matter of downtime. A few dedicated hosting providers also permit you to update the hosting program if when the present setup becomes inadequate. Last words, if you have a nice quantity of traffic and you wish to supply a fantastic experience to your users, dedicated hosting is the ideal option.
4. Security
It is because your website will be on the same server which is shared by many different sites. A single faulty script running on the host can crash the whole server.
Moreover, you will find high odds of becoming blacklisted by search engines as of someone else on exactly the exact same server participating in spamming or unethical internet practices that lead to the entire server IP address blacklisted.
Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting server is more secure and dependable. There are fewer chances of IP address blacklisting too as you’re the only person who has access to this host. Selecting a dedicated server can be challenging for you if you’re unaware of the best security methods. You will be able to control the safety applications set up as you want. Besides that, the internet host proceeds to monitor the dedicated server to make sure your website is running smoothly.
5. Control
Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is totally suited to all those site or blog owners who don’t possess the knowledge to manage and control everything. The web server provides a control panel for shared hosting clients to manage everything from the web interface. There are limitations on the type of scripting languages and also kind of files which could be utilized or run on the server. If you aren’t intended to run progress applications and do not need advanced features to run your site, shared hosting can be an economical option.
Dedicated Server Hosting: If you require complete control over the host resources, you need to choose a dedicated hosting strategy. It will give you full control of your favorite programs, scripts, and applications. You will have enhanced security and flexibility that’s much value in long run. However, you should have some technical knowledge and expertise to handle such a hosting account. It allows you to run just about any kind of application and support various programming & scripting languages. You can completely customize the environment based on your targeted demands.
Since managing a dedicated hosting program requires advanced abilities, if you cannot do it yourself, you may have to employ and maintain a dedicated group of host administrators. It could incur extra costs and might exceed your budget. So I would recommend knowing beforehand and who will manage dedicated hosting accounts to prevent extra costs in a later period.
There are few web hosts which provide managed dedicated hosting program. Such a strategy is handled by the internet host itself for an additional fee.
6. Average Price
Shared Hosting: Affordability is one of the largest reasons why many small to medium scale businesses and many web professionals opt for shared hosting programs. Shared web hosting is generally less expensive than dedicated hosting, but a fantastic deal is dependent upon the offered package.
Many hosting companies offer very cheap prices for shared hosting plans, however, it comes at a price — poor performance. This includes memory ranging from 512 MB to bandwidth and unlimited in 10 GB to infinite. The majority of the companies simply mention operating system — Linux or Windows — and there is no information about the processor on the server.
InMotion Hosting: offers unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space with free SSD (Solid State Drive) storage, a free domain, and 90 days money back warranty starting from just $4.89 per month. I had used a bunch of other hosting firms to get shared hosting but finally settled with InMotion Hosting. If you do not need much disk space and bandwidth, take a look at the SiteGround StartUp plan starting at $3.95 per month which is another decent option for small to moderate scaled websites. Bluehost shared hosting basic program begins from $3.45 with infinite bandwidth and 50 GB disk space that is another value trying option.
Dedicated Server Hosting: There are many advantages of using dedicated server hosting. But these features come at a really large price. The price of dedicated web hosting ranges from $49.99 a month to $499 per month depending upon what you need. Including 50 GB to 10 TB SSD disk space, 1 TB to unlimited bandwidth, and high computing power — 1 CPU core to 32 CPU cores.