When you have a website of your own, you have two primary options as far as web hosting is concerned:
Hosting on a shared server OR Hosting on a dedicated server
The latter, as the name suggests, implies that you have the entire server to yourself, to be used as deemed suitable. So as your business – and indeed your website scales up with content, it can easily be managed, without putting additional pressure on the overall resources of the server.
Otherwise, when you have your website hosted on a shared server, you are essentially sharing the resources of the server with other websites which would be hosted on the same server. Naturally, this would mean less bandwidth and server space available for your own website. Without a doubt, this ends up putting major constraints on websites which scale up somewhat sporadically or unexpectedly, in turn leading to a situation where customers may face considerable lag time when visiting your business website.
Given the low attention span of web users today, a poor experience on your website may well mean a complete absence of those same visitors – to your website, for good. Therefore, it is quintessential that you give an excellent experience to visitors on your website, the first time and indeed every time.
This in turn is something which we have seen happening with maximum ease, in the case of dedicated servers and not with shared servers. Accordingly, we will always recommend that you go in for dedicated server hosting to the maximum extent possible.
At the same time, cost remains a major consideration – and indeed a constraint for a lot of customers out there, which is why they prefer to go in for shared web hosting, since they find the latter to be lower on costs to a reasonable extent.
But the differences on this front are changing in a reasonably rapid manner. No longer is the cost difference between dedicated hosting and shared hosting all that stark as it used to be. In fact, cheap dedicated hosting is pretty much becoming a reality today, especially since volumes have increased manifold, with a lot of clients out there opting for dedicated hosting facilities, versus a shared arrangement. Therefore, we feel that cost is something which you need to pay a lot less attention to, than you would have in the past.
The Added Advantage of Security
Security remains one of the foremost reasons for which a dedicated server host makes a lot more sense, versus a shared server interface. Remember that when you opt for a shared server, the whole setup is pretty much like a computer at home which is used by multiple users and is therefore prone to security threats of numerous kinds. With dedicatedhosting, there are practically no concerns on this front since the server in question is exclusively yours, with all of the content on it being that of your own.
Managed and Unmanaged Dedicated Server Hosting
Even within the realm of dedicated server hosting, you will find that there is either managed hosting or unmanaged hosting. The difference between the two lies in the additional services that are offered to you in the case of a managed host such as firewall services, technical support, ongoing virus scanning and so on, which would not be offered in the case of an unmanaged host.
Therefore, after you have ideally opted for a dedicated server host, it would make maximum sense if you went in for a managed setup.
Agreed that all of the above – dedicated server hosting which also happens to be managed, would push costs somewhat but as we mentioned earlier, dedicated hosting is increasingly getting a whole lot cheaper today.
So weigh all these options very carefully, before you take a hosting decision for your business – its future prospects would quite likely depend on the choice that you make!