UFO Sightings

Shared hosting is a wonderful and inexpensive starting point for a smaller websites that do not have great amount of traffic. With time your website can outgrow the constrains of a shared web hosting plan. At this the time you may consider to purchase a dedicated server as your hosting solution. Dedicated web hosting may cost you as much as $500 a month, and today many web hosting providers offer products called Virtual Private Servers or Virtual Servers. These products offer power and flexibility of a dedicated server yet at much lower price.

Ownership of a dedicated server can b compared to owning a piece of property. You can put around a little fence and decide how much furniture and equipment you need.

Dedicated web hosting is a step up from virtual web hosting because, even if the server is provided by a web hosting company, with dedicated web hosting you are the only customer that uses the server and you generally have complete control of the server for administrative purposes. Because you administer and control the web server yourself with dedicated web hosting, you have greater flexibility. The hosting company that provides dedicated web hosting services generally owns the server and leases it to you as a dedicated web hosting client so they are responsible for hardware management. Depending upon the dedicated web hosting services provided, you may be able to handle your own upgrades and install your own software, or you can outsource such tasks to the dedicated web hosting provider.

You should expect much better performance from dedicated web hosting solution. Your site should be faster since your are not sharing neither processor, disc space or data transfer with other users.

As no one else accesses your server you can be assured of a greater security, unless of course you are your own enemy. With dedicated web hosting solution you will have a dedicated or some call it “static” IP address. With shared hosting you share IP address with other users and traffic to your website is directed by the server after examining the “host header”. With dedicated server you can access your site with your IP address.

Conversely, a server providing shared web hosting contains multiple websites on the same computer but they all have the same IP address. If you were to type in an IP address associated with a shared server, you’d get an error message or possibly would be redirected to the hosting company’s main web site. So domain names are mandatory for websites hosted on shared servers as they are the only way to access those web sites - they cannot be accessed by an IP address alone as they can be with dedicated web hosting.

Filed under: Internet Business