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!)
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