Hosting Websites - Shared or Dedicated?
For years I’ve been developing websites. And hosting is always a major issue to consider from the very start of the development process. But, there’s always one big question. Should one choose a hosting company to host their website on a shared server, or is it worth getting a dedicated server? Lets first look at the differences between them.
Shared Hosting
Companies offering shared hosting are basically renting dedicated servers and placing your website on on of their servers. It’s referred to as ’shared’ hosting because your site may be on a server with many other websites. Prices can vary by a huge range. But the rule of thumb is that you get what you pay for. Here’s a couple of examples.
| Company | Space | Bandwidth | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1&1 | 10GB | 300GB | $3.99/mo |
| EngineHosting (Ellislab) | 1GB | 25GB | $20/mo |
| Yahoo | Unlimited | Unlimited | $11.95/mo |
| iWeb.com | 600GB | Unlimited | $7.77/mo |
| HostGator | 350GB | 3,000GB | $4.95/mo |
As you can see from the above table, there seems to be no ballpark figure for what you get for your money. Companies are offering huge amounts of space and bandwidth for as low as $5/month… I pay more than that for a coffee at starbucks!
But, don’t get sucked in straight away. The figures that these companies are publishing are ridiculous, because they all get overwritten by their ‘Fair Usage Policies’.
If you registered with a host, and actually managed to push out 3,000GB/month in bandwidth, your website will be using some serious server resources, which is a violation of their fair usage policies. Basically, as soon as your site gets popular and starts using a good chunk of bandwidth, CPU, and memory, the company can ask you to upgrade to a VPS/Dedicated box, or at worst, they can terminate your service.
There is one odd one out in the group shown though… EngineHosting.
They don’t offer huge amounts of disk space or bandwidth, and they charge more! Some may think that’s a rather odd business model in this very competitive market. But, this is actually the best option of the lot.
The reason? - They charge for quality of service, and reliability:
We use state-of-the-art load-balanced clustering technology which enables groups of servers to work in unison to handle web, e-mail and other vital services for our clients. Our F5 load-balancers track the performance of the servers in each cluster, and send new traffic requests to the server that is currently handling the least number of requests, and is also responding the fastest to new requests. If one of the servers in a cluster is too slow, or not responding at all, requests are sent on to other servers in the cluster, making sure requests are handled quickly and correctly.
Because their service is load balanced, you can be pretty sure that your site will stay online, and you’ll actually be able to use that amount of bandwidth without being told off.
You might think I’m just sucking up to Ellislab, but they’re not the only company who are taking this approach in web hosting. This business model might not get them millions of customers. But you can bet once they use the service, they’ll probably stick to it.
So there’s the truth on shared hosting… you get what you pay for, so make sure you look for reviews, recorded uptime statistics, and satisfied customers when choosing a shared host.
Dedicated Servers
Hosting websites with a shared host could be dangerous if you’re not careful, you’re relying an awful lot on the company you pay.
Dedicated servers, are a whole different story though. For those of you who aren’t so sure of what they are: A dedicated server is a physical machine which one rents for their own use. The server is entirely yours, and you can host as many or as few sites as you wish.
The main reason people choose dedicated servers is due to the popularity and load of their websites. With a dedicated server, they can use as much resources as they like.
As with shared hosting, prices can vary greatly, but the same rule of thumb applies… you get what you pay for.
Here’s some samples of dedicated server prices:
| Company | CPU | Memory (RAM) | HardDisk | Bandwidth | Managed? | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iWeb.com | Core2 Duo 2.4Ghz | 1GB | 160GB SATA 2 | 1,500GB | No | $99/mo |
| ServerBeach | Celeron 440 2.0 GHz | 1GB | 160GB SATA 2 | 1,000GB | No | $99/mo |
| DediPower | Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz | 1GB | 2 x 80GB SATA II RAID 1 | 100GB | Yes | $180/mo |
| ThePlanet | Pentium4 2.4Ghz | 512MB | 80GB IDE/SATA | 750GB | No | $109/mo |
| 1&1 | Opteron 1216 2.4Ghz | 2GB | 2 x 250GB | 2,000GB | No | $99/mo |
As you can see, the prices are a good deal more than shared hosting, so always search for reviews and ‘real’ customer feedback about any server company you’re considering.
I’ve had some awful experiences with 1&1 dedicated hosting, having to call customer support in Dehli, explain 10 times what’s wrong, wait for my issue to be ‘checked’ have it promoted to second level support, have it ‘checked’ again, have it promoted to third level support, and finally, have it looked at.
The particular instance I’m remembering involved a corrupt filesystem, which rendered the OS trashed.
It took them 10 days to resolve the issue, and I got… no compensation. Lovely.
What you’ll find is that people are very quick to report their ‘bad’ experiences with a service, but not always quick to write about their good experiences, so search the net, and if you find a trend of customers complaining about similar issues, stay well away.
There are some huge advantages to having your own machine. You can configure Apache/PHP/MySQL exactly how you want them, you can host multiple websites easily, and there’s a bit of room to scale in a dedicated box.
I have a dedicated server with iWeb (who i would always recommend), and push out about 1,000GB of bandwidth each month. To begin with, I wasn’t using this amount of resources, but I still decided to go dedicated, even though a shared host would have sufficed. And have done for many years.
Why? Well - I think it’s extremely important that LAMP developers should have a good knowledge of server architectures. How they run, what alters performance, and how to configure their environments. For me, a dedicated server was an investment, and I now have a great knowledge of Linux servers.
If you’re a web developer, I’d strongly recommend renting a dedicated server to ‘play’ with, but until you’re extremely confident, It’d be a bad idea to host client’s websites on your own server. This puts you at the end of the blame.
Instead, rent a server for testing, development, education, and fun… and host any client’s sites with a good, reputable host. You could even get a reseller account to host all of your client’s sites under one account.
And remember…
You get what you pay for!
Please feel free to share your hosting experiences below, and recommend any good companies you’ve used. (No affiliate links please!)
September 25th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Holy Crap you have good taste in designs.
We used to be with “The Planet” and they basically royally screwed us. At the end of the day they wiped our whole drive and the backup and left us with nothing.
We are now with Rackspace and they have been excellent. Of course you pay a premium but I would probably double what we are now just to not have to go through all the headaches from the planet agai.
September 25th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Hosting has been something I have struggled with myself. I currently have 2 web apps and 6 or 7 other sites that need hosting but I have found it hard to swallow the cost of a dedicated server. Currently, I run a virtual private server (VPS) with HostMySite.com. They are a great company and their VPS offerings have decent resources for the cost.
Lately however, I have been meaning to investigate the cloud arena. Rackspace has a nice little subsidiary called Mosso (http://www.mosso.com) who is charging $100/mo. for “limitless” hosting. There are, of course, certain restrictions but for those designers/developers out there offering hosting to clients it looks like a good deal. Unfortunately the deal breaker for me is they don’t support wild card DNS, so I can’t use them :(.
But anyway, nice post Elliot!
September 25th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I almost bought a hosting package from 1&1 a couple of years ago, but after hearing all of the problems with their service I’m very glad I didn’t.
For the past year or so I’ve been with UnitedHosting (http://www.unitedhosting.co.uk) and have had absolutely no problems with their service. Like EngineHost you don’t get a huge amount of bang for your buck in terms of b/w and storage, but they make 4x daily backups (a little extreme I suppose, but better to be safe than sorry) and have 24/7 ticket support.
Whenever I contact them about something they are always polite courteous, often solving my problem within the hour.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Hey Chris,
I was so interested in Mosso after looking at their website, that I decided to call them and ask for some technical info.
We use rackspace at work, and even though they’re expensive, they’re very good. Mosso sounded like a great idea.
They said that from the very start MySQL databases are placed on a grid, as are virtualhosts. So, there are no ‘changes’ that need to be made as the site scales.
Their default package gives 10,000 compute cycles for $100/mo, which is about 1.2Ghz of constant processing.
Each 10,000 units over this also costs $100.
BUT! There is a package not advertised on their website, giving 30,000 cycles/mo for $200…. saving $100/mo.
They sound great, but my server is doing me just fine for now!
September 25th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I like 1and1, i mean their people support are idiots and all but i like the setup. I’ve had very few problems over the last 3 years and when i did have an issue i just got another server, cancelled the old one and transferred everything over from backups. Took all of a day. Cheap and cheerful. I would never use them for something mission critical though!
September 26th, 2008 at 7:58 am
About a year ago I finally got fed up with Dreamhost, and decided to try a VPS. I heard awesome stuff about Slicehost, and they have a really good community, so I gave it a shot. And I cannot recommend them enough. So awesome. Their plans start at 20 bucks a month. They allow you to easily scale up to higher plan if you need it. Not as much power as a dedicated, but a lot more reasonably priced. You have root access and you can install whatever distro you want. I’m never going back to shared hosting again.
September 26th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
I’ve used dreamhost for my own site (and email) for years and had very little in the way of issues, but I hear so many horror stories about them around the web that I’m afraid to recommend them to clients. Fortunately I don’t do a lot of freelance work these days so it’s not a major issue. At my day job we use a pair of servers (and a third for mysql) at rackspace. Their support has always been great, and even better we rarely have to use it.
September 26th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Hi Ellot
Do u have experiences with shared hosting on dreamhost.com ???
Regards for nice post
September 29th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
In one setting I have a MediaTemple dedicated virtual account that hosts about 11 sites right now. As you mentioned it is a great advantage to have control over your server setup (if you know what you are doing). MediaTemple has been great for me thus far and the support has been great.
On another side I’m also using Host Gator shared hosting for a few clients. Their support has been good for me but probably because I never really need to contact them. It’s dirt cheap (as seen above) and the ‘fair use’ agreement is the reason. I won’t run into that, however, with the client sites I have on their server because they simply won’t generate that type of traffic.
I also have some personal sites (like my blog) hosted with Omnis Network. I’ve been using them for 6 years and have only had 1 actual issue and it was resolved rather quickly. The issue was actually my limited knowledge of “servers” at the time! I’m on a shared server there and the disk space/bandwidth is decent but they don’t have the fair use junk that others do. They are a bit behind on keeping apache, php, etc up to date but that’s really been the only downside.
I would agree with Elliot and say that dedicated is the way to go. Not only can you learn much more by ‘playing’ (and breaking!) but you have so much more control. It’s great if you know enough and awful if you don’t…so be careful!
October 1st, 2008 at 6:58 am
I love the idea of breaking things to better learn how they work, this is pretty much the story of my early ‘career’ as a web developer: sitting in my dorm room and breaking the dedicated server that my roommate and i bought. We did all sorts of odd crap to it like writing and compiling our own PHP modules in C, installing an IRC server, and setting up a cron job to overload our proffesor’s homework submission system right as assignments were due
It was a lot of fun, and for the most part we had no idea what we were doing beforehand. Hours and hours of entering small variations of the same shell commands to see if we could get the project of the week to work, pretty often we would tank the whole thing and need to reformat it. But breaking and then fixing that server was probably more educational than a lot of the classes I took trying to teach the same subject material. (re: your previous article)
I’m going to have to second the vote for MediaTemple, those guys provide phenomenal support and reliability, at a completely reasonable price. Their TOS claims that they won’t help you fix things if you go off and tank your dedicated server by entering a strange shell command, but I did exactly this and they helped me anyways. Not to mention that compared to the twenty or so (yes, twenty) dedicated hosting companies I’ve worked with over the last few years MediaTemple’s servers are the fastest in terms of CPU output as far as I can tell.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:48 am
I third the MediaTemple VPS services, I used a ton of shared hosting companies and always had issues, I moved to MT and have been with them almost a year now with not a single issue and if/when I had question or something small I needed assistance with they were right there to help 24/7. Their servers perform very well too. Definitely my recommendation, I know people that use their GS services as well and have had a great experience.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Re: Mosso,
We’ve been using them for over a year now and we also have 5 dedicated servers elsewhere (including rackspace, server beach, AISO, and EC2). The only sites we put on Mosso are customers who want to be able to login and “play with things.” The high percentage of our customers do not need a control panel to login to so we put them on one of our Linux boxes that we manage.
Re: Hosting solutions,
We now have two web servers running on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and if you are a web developer and haven’t played with this then you need to. The pricing is the cheapest out there and they now have persistent storage for EC2 instances (EBS = Elastic Block Storage). We’ve found that the response times and server performance are the best available for the price. If you’re into the “green thing” as we are, there is a provider in california called AISO. They are fully solar powered (with their own equipment, not credits, etc).
Amazon EC2 is the future though… get on the train now.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:35 am
I will third the MediaTemple VPS solution, I currently use them just to throw all my stuff on, and I have not had any problems with it, and have root access. I will say stay away from MediaTemple shared hosting, ever since they switched over to the GridServer their shared hosting is awful. But I have had nothing but good experiences with their VPS offering.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Interesting post as it appears in this space it is easy to buy a Ferrari for the price of a Mini and more alarmingly vice versa.
I have heard that Mosso although backed by Rackspace haven’t inherited their QOS. Also the cloud starts to look a bit proprietary!
Does VPS offer an alternative or is this effectively “Shared” dressed up a bit?
November 20th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I’ve had a Linode VPS for about 3yrs now and I would have to say they’re the best I’ve found for price, features and reliability if you want/need the flexibility of a dedicated server without the price tag.
They’re constantly adding new features and on average about once every 6mths have increased the storage, RAM and data on all plans for no additional cost. I’m still paying $40/mth for double the resources (24gb storage, 720mb RAM, 400gb transfer) I had when I first signed up and I thought it was bargain back then. You can also add additional resources a la carte as necessary.
Advanced features include load balancing, failover, clustering, private networks between Linodes (if you have 2 VPS in the same datacentre), and a great web GUI to manage it all. The VPS are also based on KVM (older boxes) and more recently Xen (which I’ve migrated to) instead of Virtuozzo like most other VPS providers which seals the deal for me. Can’t recommend them highly enough.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Been with ixwebhosting for all our websites.
Thay have great offers and their support (tickets and chat)
is truly satisfactory
ale
December 14th, 2008 at 1:02 am
For an un-managed AND managed solution, I would suggest PowerVPS.com. I’ve been with them for over 3 years now and they have been wonderful. They only have e-mail support, but are always very very quick to reply and resolve issues.
I looked into Mosso.com too, but like Chris noted, their lack of support for wildcard DNS killed the deal for me.