The difference between dedicated and shared hosting kind of lies in the two names themselves. You can easily deduce from the names that shared hosting refers to a kind of hosting where multiple websites are hosted on a server where they share available computing resources. On the other hand, dedicated hosting is where only a single website is hosted on a server and that eliminates the aspect of sharing computing resources with other websites because there is simply none. Of these two hosting options, it is also easy to deduce that shared hosting is cheaper than its dedicated counterpart. What you may however not be able to deduce is that shared hosting may not meet certain hosting requirements of your website. How much dedicated server hosting costs will usually depend on several factors including customization, optimization, server performance, security, technical skill requirements, disk space, bandwidth, website reputation, and security among many others.
This article will highlight some of the differences between dedicated and shared hosting.
Server performance
If you have ever gone to a website and had to wait for a long time for pages to load and if they do, you can’t seem to get a transaction to go through because error messages keep coming up, it is likely that the website is struggling with a poorly-performing server. A shared server has to distribute its resources across the may websites that are hosted on it and this can often make it strain, leading to poor performance.
This same problem doesn’t occur in dedicated hosting because here, websites enjoy full dedication of the computing resources of the server. Thus, performance is optimal so you won’t run into delays or error messages.
Optimization
In a shared hosting environment, you don’t have the same kind of access to the server like dedicated hosting provides. You have to share the server with hundreds of other people and the service provider will not trust you with the security and wellbeing of the other clients since you are also just one of their clients. As such, you can’t optimize the server to your specific needs because doing that albeit not possible would affect the other websites hosted on the server.
Security
Dedicated servers offer you maximum access so that you control how your website is accessed. This way, you can ensure that there is no source of security breach that can give hackers access to your website. The same cannot be said about shared hosting where every site on the server is a potential source of a breach. Any website owner on the server that does not maintain their website by updating security patches presents a security breach for all other websites hosted there.
No matter how careful you are, it is not possible to stay safe from hackers and security breaches in an environment like that. With a dedicated server, you can control everything by updating security patches and necessary updates so that hackers who continuously search through thousands of websites looking for the ones that haven’t installed latest updates won’t have a way in. In that line, when in need of cheap dedicated servers Australia should be the first place to consider.
