What’s the Difference Between Shared and Dedicated Hosting?

When choosing a hosting service for your website, you may come across two common types: shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Both types of hosting have their advantages and disadvantages. It’s important to understand the differences between them to make an informed decision that meets your website’s needs.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a type of hosting where multiple websites share a single server and its resources. This means that the server’s resources, such as CPU, RAM, and storage, are shared among multiple websites.

Advantages

• Cost: Shared hosting is a very cost-effective option for small businesses. There is no upfront investment. Since many websites share one pool of resources, the cost per website is relatively low.
• Ease: Shared hosting is easy. There are many tools to help you build, manage, and get reports for a hosting site. You get pre-installed software, control panel, and other features that make it easy to set up and manage website. You don’t need a lot of technical knowledge. The right shared hosting company, like ISOCNET, will provide top-notch support.

Disadvantages

• Performance: With shared hosting, your website performance can be impacted by another user. One bad site on a server can impact every website on that server. While programs tend to stop or quickly catch a rogue site, it can still happen. However, most websites in a shared environment never see a problem.
• Limitations: There tend to be more limitations on a shared hosting service than any others. This can include actual server resources that may limit how large your files are or how many visitors you can get. In a shared hosting environment, you do not have the flexibility to change server-level settings. You are limited to your website and database files.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is a type of hosting where a single website is hosted on a single server. All of the server resources are available for that one website. Dedicated hosting is ideal for large businesses or websites that need a lot of resources to perform and reliable platform. This includes e-commerce websites, very large websites, websites with custom functionality, or high-traffic blogs. This could also be used for Intranets and hosting of Business Line of Applications.

Advantages

• Performance: A dedicated server is going to give you the best performance. All resources are used for one purpose or one website or application. Therefore, it will get the best performance at the optimal speed.
• Flexibility & Control: With your own server, you can do whatever you want to with it. For example, you can make configuration changes at the server level. Or you can run a strict security and access policy. You can also run dedicated custom code, and so much more.

Disadvantages

• Cost: Cost is the biggest disadvantage to a dedicated server. Because you have a dedicated, custom environment, there will be more costs. Your business is responsible for the entire server, management, and backups. This will result in much higher costs.

Which Type of Hosting is Right for Me?

Both shared and dedicated hosting options have their place. Most websites work fine on a shared hosting environment. There are many businesses that run their business on one application that is suited for a dedicated server. If need help weighing your options, talk to one of our hosting experts today!