Jon Murray asked:


When you first start thinking about building your first web site you are faced with a lot of choices. You need to choose a domain name, but also somebody to register that domain name. You need to decide on whether you’ll use a CMS tool like Joomla or a blog engine like Wordpress, or maybe you’ll purchase a nice template and use that. One of the biggest choices you’ll need to make is your hosting service. The right hosting service can be the difference between spending time installing and configuring your site and spending time adding content.

Once you’ve chosen your hosting service you will be asking yourself one more important question. Do I choose shared hosting or dedicated hosting? There is not an easy one or the other answer to that question. In fact I’m having trouble even phrasing it generically so that you can size up your situation and decide, but I’ll lay down a few rules and gotcha’s and see where we end up.

On the surface shared hosting seems like a great deal. For instance from Go Daddy you can get shared hosting plan for just $3.99 a month. The plan will give you 5GB of disk space and 250GB bandwidth. For a little more, $6.99 you get 100GB disk and 1000 GB bandwidth. Now, I just used Go Daddy as an example, but Host Gator and others are similar, some with slightly higher prices and some with slightly lower, but all have the same rules.

Hidden somewhere in your shared hosting agreement there will be a clause about not hogging system resources. What that means is that even if your site is not busy 99% of the time, if you get a big spike they have the right to shut you down. You see, the factor to be concerned with is not bandwidth or disk storage, it’s CPU cycles. It’s not average CPU cycles over the month, if you spike even for a short time all hosting services will shut down your shared account.

How do I know about the shared host shutdown? It happened twice to me. I’m not complaining, that’s the price of having a successful web site while paying for bargain basement hosting. In my one case I got shut down because I had 8000 hits in about an hour. My daily average was about 500 hits. It seems that the blog engine I was using was using too much CPU time on my shared host, so they shut me down. Okay, so you’re thinking that you can go shared and when you get to around 7000 then you can switch over to dedicated. Maybe that’ll work, but in another case I was shut down with just 346 hits. Now for the 346 hit case my host sent me the log file and to my eyes it didn’t seem that I was using much CPU at all. It showed my account using 100% CPU for .2 seconds. It also showed (in another case) my process taking 29 seconds, but using 0% CPU. I believe this was a case of mistaken identity. They saw that their server was slow and looked for long running processes, but didn’t look at actual cycles taken. The long wait by the way was because of a YouTube vid running on my site.

So, after a full year on two shared hosting accounts, from two different companies, it was time to try my hand at dedicated hosting. One thing you must know about dedicated hosting is that you are running and responsible for all aspects of the box. That means that you are “root”. There is nobody else monitoring for hung processes, nobody else installing software for you, but the best part is nobody kicking you off for using too much CPU for 10 seconds of the month.

My shared hosting accounts were $6.99 and $10 (total of $17/month). My new dedicated hosting account started at $79/month, but I bumped up the memory and CPU on the box and the final price is $111/month. That’s a huge difference when you’re just starting out, and over the first year I’ve saved $1200 going that way, but now I feel to move forward with my web sites I need the freedom that dedicated hosting allows. Freedom to have a busy day, freedom to be successful.

I don’t want to make you shy away from shared hosting when you’re just starting out. It’s a great way to get your feet wet, establish a proof of concept and build your knowledge while keeping your budget low. Many small businesses or personal pages may never need more than a shared hosting account. For me, one year on shared hosting gave my little business enough time to grow enough for me to justify paying for dedicated hosting.

As a closing note, my ongoing move from my shared hosting accounts to my dedicated hosting account has taken about two weeks. The first couple of days was experimenting and learning, followed by a few days moving my best performing sites over and the last week has been spent moving the rest of my web sites over, cleaning up security and doing more learning. In the end, I chose Go Daddy as my dedicated host. I figured they deserved it, at least when they shut me down at 8000 hits it was conceivable that I was over stressing my shared account. As for the other company, the one who shut me down with the log file which proved nothing at 350 hits, sometimes you only get one mistake and in the web business when your site is having it’s best day ever and your host shuts you down without good reason, it’s time to move on.

Christine Anderssen asked:


Let’s recap the different types of hosting services that are available:

1. Free web hosting – these are normally sponsored through advertising. A no-no if you are serious about hosting your website for business purposes.

2. Shared hosting – shared hosting is the most common type of hosting available today. This is most commonly used if you are running a small website or are just starting out.

3. VPS hosting (Virtual Private Servers) – this is the poor man’s dedicated server. With VPS hosting the hosting provider partitions one server into multiple private spaces. You are therefore still sharing a server with other clients, but you get your own private ’slice’ of this server. This means that your website performance will not be affected by the other clients sharing the same server since each client has his own virtual private space in which they run. Clients that host on VPS servers therefore has access to the same type of services normally only afforded by dedicated hosting technology

4. Dedicated hosting services are needed by clients with large websites that generate high volumes of traffic. There are also some companies which need huge storage space, and are not willing to share space with smaller companies but with the price of hardware and hard disks coming down in recent years, the more common reason to require a dedicated server these days are more to do with bandwidth usage and performance.

In both these cases, dedicated hosting providers the solution. Instead of sharing space on a shared server or even with a Virtual Private Server, you will lease an entire dedicated machine that is pre-configured for your requirements. Hosting companies that offer dedicated hosting are often larger and more established than companies that only offer shared hosting. Small web hosts often do not have the financial or technical muscle to provide dedicated hosting.

Web hosting companies that make provision for dedicated servers need to make a considerable investment in hardware and software, and because the client has full control over what type of software should be run on these machines, the hosting company also requires more investment in training and skills development of their staff. The hosting company also needs to make provision to stay up to date with the latest developments in hardware and software. The web host therefore needs to upgrade technology regularly to be able to provide state-of-the-art equipment.

Remember that the advantages of dedicated hosting is that the client does not control the hardware and basic software that is required to run the server, nor does the client have to employ any technical resources to maintain the hardware and software – this is completely the responsibility of the dedicated hosting provider.

This is why dedicated hosting costs considerably more than shared hosting or even VPS hosting. The cost can range between $99 to $2500 per month depending on which hosting company you deal with and depending on the client requirements. The cost will also be determined by the type of service contract that will be put in place between the client and the hosting company. Such a contract is commonly called a Service Level Agreement and it spells out the requirements of the client to a low level of detail. These requirements normally cover issues such as bandwidth usage, the required up-time of the server, scheduled maintenance slots and so on. The higher the required level of support from the hosing provider, the more expensive the monthly rental contract will be.

In some cases the client would do some of the management of the server himself (this is called un-managed hosting). In this case the hosting provider will only provide the physical server and infrastructure (e.g. network connectivity, storage space etc). In this case the actual management and monitoring of the servers are the responsibility of the client and this type of dedicated hosting should be on the cheaper side of dedicated hosting costs. It must be remembered then though that the client must make provision for employing technical staff to maintain the servers.