Should You Choose A Shared Or A Dedicated Website Hosting Server?

One of the things you're going to need to make a decision about when you're starting a new website is what kind of server you'd like to host it on. This can sound a bit complicated to the uninitiated, so we've gone into it in some more detail below.

Shared Servers

The cheapest option - and the one used by free hosts and by most people who are just starting out - is to have a single server on which multiple websites are hosted. These are often a good choice simply for the price alone, and for most intents and purposes you'll find that they do perfectly well - especially if you're trying to host a small, personal site rather than anything larger.

There are drawbacks, though. Shared servers aren't good for ecommerce, because they're nothing like as secure as other options and aren't a good place to store customer's payment details or other data. They also can't generally handle high traffic or lots of hits, because you're sharing a maximum bandwidth with every other site on the server. There's also a chance of more downtime on a shared server than you'll get on other methods. All told, it's a great way to get started - but you'll probably want to move on to a dedicated server after a little while.

Dedicated Servers

This way, you're paying for exclusive use of the entire server - which is, obviously, more expensive. You definitely get what you pay for in this regard, however; you won't be sharing disk space or bandwidth, you'll be protected from all kinds of security risks and vulnerabilities, and you'll have a lot more control over the server's settings and configurations.

Of course, there are still drawbacks. You won't have any backup if the server goes down - for that you'd need to look into a cloud server, which would essentially give you multiple dedicated servers that all belonged to you. This obviously comes at a greatly increased cost, but ends up being worth it for very big and busy websites with a lot of traffic.

In Conclusion: How To Choose

Ideally, what you want to do is start small at work up. At first, you might not need anything more than what you can get from a free package - but as you move on to selling things online you'll need a basic shared server hosting arrangement. Then, as your business grows and expands, you'll find that eventually it becomes time to move to a dedicated server - and for a very successful venture you'll eventually discover that what you really need is a server cloud of your own to protect you from downtime and keep everything securely ticking over.

You need to be realistic about how much money you have to spend and what you can afford, of course, as well as about how much space and bandwidth you need - but remember that cheap hosting can sometimes cost you more money than it saves! Website downtime, whether due to server trouble or running out of bandwidth or anything else, results in you losing money from customers and damages the reputation of your business. In the long term, a stable website host with good servers is probably be best investment anyone trying to make money online could go for. Bear this in mind while making your choice, and don't let yourself end up wasting money by making false economies.