You are an entrepreneur, having recently embarked on a new business journey. You solicit the help of a top web design agency to glean a web design for your business. Once you have a flawlessly functional and aesthetically pleasant website in hand, comes the time to host it. This is where business owners stumble across technical jargon that passes over their heads. As a result, they end up choosing a wrong hosting option, which makes their fantastic website looks like a design nightmare.

Your website goes offline repeatedly and is plagued by a host of performance issues. Did you know why? Because you have chosen a wrong web hosting type or service provider. To save yourself from falling prey to a similar situation, you should be aware of different types of web hosting and their pros and cons before choosing one.

In this article, we pit shared hosting against dedicated hosting and tell you the differences, so you can choose the right one according to your website needs.

What is Shared Hosting?

In shared web hosting, one physical server is shared by a number of users. Thanks to its cost-effectiveness and easy to use nature, shared hosting is gaining more ground among small businesses. It is an ideal choice for websites that see limited traffic and where content needs to be updated frequently.

What is Dedicated Hosting?

In dedicated web hosting, all the server resources are reserved for your website. You can even control its operating environment and even the configuration. All those who don’t want to make compromises should opt for best dedicated servers to host their website on. If your business is expanding rapidly and involves high-resolution photos and videos, dedicated hosting is your best bet.

Differences Between Shared and Dedicated Hosting?

After getting all the nitty-gritty definitions out of the way, let’s look at some differences between shared and dedicated web hosting.

1. Cost

When it comes to the cost, shared hosting is cheaper than dedicated hosting because the cost gets divided among multiple users. Due to its cost-effective nature, many small businesses and organizations are jumping on this idea. On the contrary, dedicated hosting weights heavier on the pickets, but delivers better performance and operational flexibility. This allows you to cope up with instant traffic spikes in a much better way. Moreover, you can customize your server and install specialized software on it, which more than makes up for the higher price tag.

2. Hardware and Network Resources

In shared hosting, a pool of resources is shared between multiple users, which is why the bandwidth and disk space you get for your website is limited because many users are drawing resources from the same server. Moreover, you will be charged extra when you exceed the allotted resource limit.

If you choose the best-dedicated server hosting, you will get access to all the bandwidth and disk space because you are the only one using the resources. With no resource sharing and limitations, you can get the best performance and choose resources according to your needs.

3. Server Performance and Response Time

Shared hosting is not capable of handling unexpected surges in traffic, as it puts more pressure on limited resources. This results into slow response time and painstakingly sluggish loading times. This not only frustrates your customers but also makes your employees exasperated. You can bid adieu to all these woes if you choose a dedicated server. You can enjoy faster response times and more bandwidth, so everything works smoother on a dedicated server as compared to a shared server.

4. Security

Your hosting company will install firewalls, server security applications, and programs. Security experts are given a responsibility to provide a safe and stable operating environment for the organization on shared servers. On the other hand, you will be responsible for securing the dedicated server. Your company’s IT department will have to configure the software to detect and mitigate threats. They will have to control the security software installed on your dedicated server. Dedicated servers are more secured and less vulnerable to malware, viruses, and spyware because there are no other users. The hosting company is responsible for keeping your server powered and physically secured.

5. Control

The level of control you can enjoy with a dedicated server is way more than what you get with shared hosting. In shared hosting, the hosting company makes all the decisions on your behalf, so there is very little that you can control. If your organization needs controls on a granular level, you won’t be getting it with shared hosting.

Dedicated hosting offers you with more customization options and settings. Your organization will have complete control over the server when you go for dedicated hosting. You get to choose preferred programs, applications and scripts and you could meet your organizational requirements easily.

6. IP Blocking

Another major issue associated with shared hosting is that Google and other search engines might blacklist your website or block your IP even if someone else whose website is hosted on your server is involved in some illegal activities. You can end up paying a price of wrongdoings of others. Frustrating, isn’t it. In worse cases, your IP gets blacklisted making your website invisible. You don’t have to worry about all these issues if you are taking the dedicated hosting route as your website is the only website hosted on your dedicated server. The chances of your website getting blocked is thin when it is hosted on the dedicated server.

7. Technical Know How

One advantage of shared hosting has over dedicated hosting is that you don’t need technical skills or have to hire technical experts because maintenance, administration, and security is managed by a HostNoc – shared hosting provider. Although, it simplifies server management and operation for your company, but it also limits what your company can do by offering less control in your hands.

Managing a dedicated server requires a level of technical know-how and skills as your IT department will have to set up, install and administer and manage the server. If you want a dedicated server but don’t want to get into these technicalities then, you can take advantage of fully managed dedicated hosting plans but you will have to pay a higher cost for it.

Which of these differences highly influence your hosting choice? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.