Differences between Shared and Dedicated Hosting
Since the irruption of CloudLinux in the market of servers with GNU/Linux operating system, the physical resources assigned to the Hosting accounts are not a problem and it is possible to be hosted for a small price without your website being affected by the resources that other accounts may consume.
Translated to a more common context, I would say that Web Hosting is like renting an apartment among several friends/acquaintances or strangers with whom you share not only the expenses, but also the kitchen, bathroom and common services.
While a Dedicated Hosting would be like renting your own apartment where you enjoy all the services but you also assume its maintenance and expenses.
What are the most common types of Hosting
There are as many hosting services as there are ways to manage them, but the most common are these 4:
Shared Hosting
Dedicated Hosting
VPS Hosting
Cloud Hosting
Performance is key
We know it, and that’s why we tune our servers to make the Webs fly.
We have become expert craftsmen of Web acceleration technology: Nginx, Varnish, PHP 8.0, 7.4, HTTP/2, CloudLinux…
Performance is one of the most important aspects to consider as it determines among others the load times, the famous “first byte”, the amount of memory allocated and other resources needed to keep a website active and accessible.
Most users who access your website expect it to load in 2 seconds or less, and tend to leave when the site is not loaded in 3 seconds.
Possibly almost 79% of Hosting users who have problems with the performance of their website will not hire that service again and approximately 44% of them will comment in their circles of influence the experience suffered in certain web hosting services.
Questions to ask yourself before choosing
It is clear that the needs of your web projects are the ones that will mark the decision to choose the type of Hosting you need. Some of the questions you should ask yourself are listed below.
- What kind of web projects are you going to host?
- What volume of web traffic will your websites have?
- Do you foresee important traffic peaks?
- Are you going to host one or several webs in the same Hosting?
- Are you going to install any specific software (script) or Apps?
- Do you need private SSL Certificates?
- Do you need a dedicated IP?
- Security is very important, do you need customized or special security?
- Do you need a lot of data processing capacity?
- What is your budget?
…other questions you can think of. In this simple table I indicate some common questions (FAQs) that you should ask yourself before deciding on a Shared or Dedicated Hosting service.
FAQ – Questions for decision making
Shared Hosting
Dedicated hosting
Parameters to compare Shared with Dedicated
There are many ways and parameters to evaluate the convenience of choosing one or another type of Hosting and thus choose the one that will be your provider (for example, Webempresa, who offers hosting service in Spain) during the time of contracting.
Here are some of the points you should consider before contracting:
- Disk space
- Domain (register 1 domain the first year for free)
- Monthly bandwidth
- Performance
- Security
- Control Panel
- 1 click installers
- Pricing
- Money back guarantee
- 24/7/365 support by professionals (not outsourced)
Shared Hosting
It is characterized by hosting numerous user accounts, separate and independent, usually caged (CloudLinux), where many websites hosted on different accounts use the same server resources.
The growth in a Shared Hosting is limited to the type of contracted plan that will allocate a certain amount of databases, email accounts, additional domains and/or aliases and disk space, since in this type of services the resources of the same machine are shared with a few hundred more users.
Dedicated Hosting
A Dedicated Server generally hosts few accounts of the same user or company (corporate sites) where other web applications or intranets coexist and where the resources are used to guarantee the uptime and optimized performance of the websites or online services.
In a Dedicated Server you are the administrator and responsible for its uptime and security, you control the resources you allocate and determine the limits for the account or accounts you manage on it.
In a few words, in a Dedicated Hosting you have a complete machine at your disposal to host one or several websites.
VPS
ASome questions you should ask yourself to analyze if you need a VPS are:
- ¿Will the sites to be hosted have heavy or highly variable traffic?
- Do you need to minimize downtime or ensure high availability?
- Do you want control over the server and its performance?
It is evident that the installation and administration of a VPS requires high knowledge in System Administration, do you have it? and also special dedication to the security or hardening of the server to avoid the fall or invasion of this.
In favor of this type of hosting I will say that scalability is its most outstanding value, since it means that you will be able to grow in space, have an exclusive bandwidth, unlimited database management (the disk marks the physical limits) and a lot of data processing power.
Conclusions
Before deciding on the choice of a Dedicated Hosting or a Shared one, do not forget that the reputation of the provider of your choice, its present position in a very competitive market and its future projection with regard to the improvement of the hardware park and the commercialized plans are aspects to be valued above purely economic aspects.
In the end, the choice between shared web hosting or dedicated web hosting will depend on the real needs of your web projects, your budget and your ability to manage the server and its security versus the delegation of these issues in the case of shared ones.
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