When building your own website, one of the most crucial decisions you will face is how you want to host it. Out of the huge variety of hosting packages and options, the most important choice is whether you want shared or dedicated hosting plan.

In order to make this decision, you need to have an understanding of the differences between shared and dedicated hosting. That is how you know which option works best for you. So we decided to explore the world of website and server hosting in a little more detail. All to help make your hosting decisions a little easier.

What is the difference between shared and dedicated hosting?

Shared hosting is the standard website hosting way. With shared hosting, thousands of sites are stored on a single server, sharing resources, with a set allocation of things like:

• CPU usage
• Memory
• Disk space.

With dedicated hosting, a website is stored and hosted on its own unique server, with no resource sharing of any kind. All memory, usage, and disk space are available for your website’s needs. This provides more flexibility when it comes to configuration, resource management, and custom installations.

What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Shared hosting is popular for one main reason – its simplicity. Shared hosting tends to come with a user-friendly dashboard. This makes it easy to manage your domain and account settings. In addition, all maintenance and updates are taken care of by your service provider. With a shared hosting package you can get your website up and running quickly with just a few clicks. 

But shared hosting is limited. After all, you are sharing resources with thousands of other websites, and restrained by the limitations of your host.

Dedicated hosting, on the other hand, gives you a more bespoke, high-quality, and super-charged service. For businesses and websites with ambition, the benefits of having your own server and hosting service are clear. With dedicated hosting you’ll be able to rely on lightning-fast load times however heavy your website traffic gets, and your website will always be performing to its maximum capacity.

Dedicated hosting gives you something called ‘root access’, which allows total control over your server. Dedicated servers are also vastly more secure than shared servers, with DDoS as standard, meaning your website stays safer and better protected, and you don’t have to worry about downtime.

To find out a little more about whether dedicated or shared hosting plan is the best option for you, get in touch with Dynamic Hosting today and let us share our expertise!