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Possible Duplicate:
How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?

What is the difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting for my website?

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also look at How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/20838/… – anthonyg Oct 12 '11 at 7:26
Interesting that this was closed as a duplicate of a question that was asked way after this one. This was a seed question for the site anyway, so not a big deal, but still seems unnecessary and arbitrary to close it. – Justin Scott Jun 15 '12 at 16:10

marked as duplicate by John Conde♦ Jun 14 '12 at 19:44

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Shared hosting means that there are other sites on the same server you are on sharing things like bandwidth and resources. Dedicated hosting means that you are the only one on the server and all the resources belong to you. Usually dedicated hosting is more expensive, but it provides better performance if you need it.

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up vote 5 down vote

Shared hosting

Pros:

  • Cheap
  • Fully managed by hosting company

Cons

  • You are at mercy of other sites poor performance
  • You are in a restricted environment

Dedicated hosting

Pros:

  • You have full control of the machine
  • You can set up the web server app whatever you want
  • The performance only depends on your apps in the server

Cons

  • You have to take care of the machine security patches, etc
  • If something goes bad, you may have several hours of downtime, depending on your setup, backups, etc (you have to take care of that)
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up vote 1 down vote

Cost and dedicated resources available. Given a constant or fixed cost (ot compare apples to apples), it is all about the tradeoff between normal and burst traffic. If you have a dedicated host, you have all of your resources all of the time, but no more. If you are running in a shared environment, you may well be able to take advantage of more resources than you would have available on a dedicated host.

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depending on your host, of course :) – Jason Jul 8 '10 at 20:11

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