Dedicated Or Shared Web Hosting? What Does Your Business Need
Nothing is more frustrating as a webmaster then waking in the morning, firing up your browser to check your web site only to find a message saying “This site has exceeded it’s bandwidth limit of the moon”
It’s embarrassing, not to mention time consuming and expensive if you lose the sale.
On the other side of the scale, it can be very expensive for a larger plan or dedicated server web hosting and almost did not even use the services offered.
Good quality web hosting is not cheap, but you need to balance the needs of your business with what you really afford to pay.
So what web hosting service should you use? Good question!
In this article I will talk about the pros and cons of both shared web hosting packages and dedicated web hosting. At the end of your article should have some idea what online business you need now and what will need when expanding.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is what most small online businesses use. Shared hosting means that your sites on one server that also holds the websites of others as well. Your website will not be the only one on the server. Very few small online businesses require the power of a dedicated server.
Most companies offer some type of shared web hosting services. The only difference usually becomes how much disk space you want or how much transfer allowance you need.
The main difference between each package really is how many domain names that you can host, how much transfer (how many megabytes who are downloading from your website) you can have and how much disk space (how many files you can store ) you need.
If you are just starting out online and do not have a website yet and not sure what you’re doing right, starting with a small plan. That’s more then enough for a small site or blog for this.
Now if you run a larger site and you offer a lot of downloads, say for example you sell the ebook rather large, you may need a great service. Say you have a 10mb ebook to sell, these companies offer great service will allow you to have about 2000 downloads of the package before you run out of bandwidth (transfer).
Hosting
Dedicated hosting is for big kids. This is for medium to large businesses looking to do a lot of work online. A dedicated server is just that, your own server. You get your own server just for your website that do not like shared hosting because you have to share the server.
There are different packages available with dedicated hosting depending on how much you want to spend. More resources the server has, IE, RAM, hard drive space, processor speed, the more it will cost.
You can see that a dedicated server allows you more disk space and transfer allowance. It also allows you unlimited domain names. Dedicated servers are also known to be much more stable and allows you more control over your website and it is suitable for a professional image.
There are two types of dedicated servers ….
Managed hosting
Managed hosting offers you the technical support team to keep your server. They do all the updates and technical side of things for you. They will perform routine maintenance without you even asking. Managed hosting is how ever does not cost a lot more then un-managed normally.
Un-managed hosting
Un-managed hosting is no lack of support as it sounds. Indeed most dedicated servers come with technical assistance and maintenance routine, but each question will more then likely support additional costs. If you need something added to your server, it will cost you in maintenance costs. Reboot your server should also come free with the un-managed dedicated hosting.
Multiple Domain Name Hosting
Another thing to look at is whether you want to host multiple domain names with one hosting package. Both shared hosting and dedicated hosting can allow you to do this. Many shared hosting services now allow this.
I recommend always using a web host that allows you to have multiple domain names with one account. This really solve the problem of having multiple hosting accounts to a different domain name.
Other Things To Look For
Other things to think about when looking for a web hosting company is what you want to do with your website.
Do you need a lot of technical assistance? If so, look for a hosting company with a live 24 / 7 support. Do you want to create a blog, or a lot about blogs? Then you will need to see if your web hosting company allows you to setup multiple databases MYSQL.
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