When Should Our Company Switch From Shared To Dedicated Hosting

Shared hosting is sufficient for a new website with few visitors, but serious businesses need serious bandwidth and server resources. Shared hosting can’t offer the control and options that dedicated hosting offers. Here’s a deeper look at the difference in the two plan options, so you can choose which is right for you.

Shared hosting is what most businesses start out with. Generally cheap but offering limited customization, the host sets up space on a server with hundreds of other webmasters. The webmaster can also add databases to the hosting service, but the database is also shared with hundreds of other site owners.

The host usually gives webmasters a simple web-based dashboard where they can upload, delete or edit files. There isn’t much control with shared hosting. The webmaster can manipulate files but cannot change any server settings or customize the web server. This means that any web services or propriety software might not execute properly.

Problems with shared hosting occur when other webmasters use up too much bandwidth. Other sites on the same server can even crash the business website, or one hacked website can allow the hacker to gain access to other websites on the same server. Bandwidth is limited, because the host places hundreds of sites on the same server. If any of those sites gain momentum, other sites on the server suffer from low bandwidth. It’s at this point that the host will ask the site owner to move to dedicated servers.

Dedicated servers are exactly what they sound like. These are servers dedicated to you and no other webmaster shares the machine’s resources. No other sites are stored on the server, and no other webmaster has access to any of the machine’s resources. Webmasters who sign up for dedicated server hosting have complete control of the server.

Dedicated server hosting is much more expensive than shared hosting, but the control and performance are far superior to a shared hosting account. First, the webmaster can remotely control the server using software such as Microsoft’s Remote Desktop. The site owner can change settings, add software, or reboot the server from the desktop.

Need to add database software? Dedicated servers allow the webmaster to add database software and host as many databases as necessary. The webmaster can even install different database software to accommodate multiple websites with different database connections.

Although dedicated servers are more expensive, if the business runs multiple sites on separate shared hosting accounts, pooling those accounts together onto one main dedicated server can actually prove less expensive.

It’s difficult for webmasters to gauge when a move to a dedicated hosting plan is necessary. High bandwidth usage and spikes in traffic greatly reduce performance on a site hosted on a shared server. This issue is one of the main reasons to switch. If the business has proprietary software that needs customized server settings, shared hosting won’t allow the webmaster to make the necessary changes. If the business site impacts the rest of the sites on the shared server, the host might ask the business to move, even if the webmaster isn’t ready. If the IT budget permits, a growing business should move to a dedicated hosting plan to account for future traffic and gain the freedom of a customizable solution.