Why Use Shared Hosting?

There are a lot of web hosting companies on the net offering a range of services, for both large and small websites. with the reduction of hardware prices and with the virtualization of technology, organizations are now offering virtual private server hosting options and dedicated server hosting options as well.

Dedicated server hosting is known to offer more security and power but this does not mean that it is the best option always to choose from. Let us first understand what is web hosting.

What Is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a platform that is needed by every website to go live on the internet. People often tend to confuse internet service providers with web hosting. However, the truth of the matter is that not many internet service provider offer web hosting. It is equally true that a lesser number of companies that offer web hosting offer ISP services as well. Internet service provider companies offer the internet access to you and you can connect your computer to the internet. However web hosting companies, on the contrary keep a track of the websites that you visit using your internet access.

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting can be described as the least expensive and the most common type of website hosting. It is referred to as ‘shared’ as a number of websites and a number of database& email users tend to share the same hardware. This hosting technology is quite well developed and allows a single server to be shared by multiple users without any breach of security of any individual website. Normally, the users use a control panel to access their files, create and add domains. Now let us see what Dedicated Hosting   is.

Dedicated Hosting-What Is It?

Dedicated hosting is another form of hosting with a difference that it is much more expensive than shared hosting and this is because if the fact that instead of a single server being shared by multiple users , a single server is dedicated to a single user. This user has full authoritative access and is responsible for server backups, updates and security maintenance.

Why Is Shared Better Than Dedicated?

Unless there is a specific need of dedicated server hosting, shared hosting is far more beater than dedicated hosting in many ways. Users get more support, server backups, free server maintenance and server monitoring.

When you use shared web hosting then web hosting companies are the ones who are responsible for everything-right from maintenance to uptime. These companies perform the following maintenance tasks, usually, for shared servers:

• They carry out hardware monitoring which includes watching out for hard drive, RAM failure etc.
• Software monitoring –the companies make sure that the web server, email servicesand database continues to run.
• Service monitoring – if the web server unexpectedly becomes unresponsive, the failed services are restarted automatically and service logsare investigatedso as to fix the problem and prevent it in the future.
• These companies also offer powerful website management tools, which include restoration features and backup tools.

Some companies also offer managed dedicated hosting but the cost for the additional services are usually included in the price paid by the customers for their servers. Even at it best dedicated server hosting offers only hardware maintenance and that too users need to know what has failed in order to request the service provider to fix it. So if the user makes use of dedicated hosting one has to organize the following services and that too for an additional cost:

• Hardware monitoring
• Service monitoring.
• Security maintenance.
• The backups
• Restoration

Thus, shared hosting is definitely a much better option than dedicated hosting. It is suited to most of the businesses and for the personal websites as well. A lot many businesses, especially the new startups are opting for shared hosting, as it not only offers a range of additional services, the costs associated with the hosting is a fraction of what they would otherwise pay for dedicated hosting. Unless there is a definite need for more power and security, there is no reason why one should opt for dedicated hosting. Using shared hosting in place would be much more inexpensive and a wise decision to take.