Shared Vs. Dedicated Web Hosting

The phrased that is used to describe a service that is provided by a web hosting company where the server is shared by multiple websites (but is sectioned off for security) is "shared web hosting." There are a few other things that they share as well, but they won't be considered here. On the other side, dedicated web hosting is when an entire server is dedicated to ONE website. Dedicated web hosting can be very expensive. When the internet first became popular, dedicated web hosting was the only service available.

 

Shared web hosting made it possible (financially) for many people, businesses, institutions and organizations to have a web presence. A huge influx was created into the internet from the resources that created shared web hosting. Although a lot of large corporations still use dedicated servers, the majority of websites use shared web hosting services.

 

Shared web hosting has some difficulties at times. When choosing a web hosting provider that offers shared web hosting you will need to make sure that their particular services will avoid the possible difficulties. It is important that the hosting provider manages the server which includes security, maintenance, uptime and monitoring. Since you can't provide maintenance to the server yourself -- because the shared web hosting server isn't located where you are -- you will need to make sure that your provider is conducting maintenance as well as monitoring the server.

 

Monitoring the server is crucial to shared web hosting situations. If you had your own dedicated server (computer) that was in your house, you could check it out yourself to see if it was working. However, with shared hosting that is not the case and you depend on the hosting company to do it for you. As I stated before, monitoring of the server is very important.

 

You do not want any downtime because the internet is a 24/7 marketplace. You want people from anywhere in the world to be able to access your website, even if it's 3:00 am their time, your time, whatever! The maintenance plays a big part in the uptime issue.

 

The final difficulty to be taken care of by the hosting provider for shared web hosting is security. Not only security from each website having access to one another, but also from the outside. In order to prevent the servers from going down and the sites to be unavailable, the provider must have firewalls and additional security measures taking place.