Searching for a hosting account can be quite a task. There are so many options to choose from, and if you don’t understand all the technical jargon, it’s not straightforward what you should buy. For example, there’s shared hosting and dedicated hosting, and many different account options within each of those categories.
If you’re not familiar with web hosting, you might be wondering if it’s worth paying a higher price for dedicated hosting. In theory, dedicated hosting can seem like the better option (especially since it comes with a premium price tag), but in reality, most businesses will do just fine with shared hosting.
What’s the difference between shared and dedicated hosting?
The main difference is that shared hosting puts a bunch of websites from different customers on the same server. With dedicated hosting, you have your own hosting environment on a server that nobody else can access. With dedicated hosting, you get access to all of the server’s resources, and you don’t have to worry about getting hacked if someone gains access to the main part of the server.
Dedicated hosting costs far more than shared hosting. For instance, shared hosting can cost between $5 and $30 per month, while dedicated hosting can cost between $50 and $350+ per month. With a dedicated server, you’ll have the root access required to configure the server as needed for special applications, and you can modify more code. Perhaps one of the best benefits of dedicated hosting is that you don’t have to worry about your site going down if someone else’s website crashes the whole server.
Although there are obvious benefits to having a dedicated server, it’s not always necessary. For most businesses, shared hosting is enough.
Most websites don’t use many server resources
Server resources include things like RAM, bandwidth, and disk space. While dedicated hosting accounts offer far more resources compared to shared hosting accounts, most websites will never need those higher limits. For example, there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers in the world, and most of them use WordPress on a simple shared hosting account. They use sites like The Blog Starter to get a good deal on web hosting with sites like Blue Host, pay for a couple of years up front, and never need to upgrade their account for the lifetime of their blog.
Most business websites are in the same boat. Service professionals, like plumbers and electricians, along with non-ecommerce businesses, like manufacturers and suppliers, will never need the amount of resources provided by dedicated hosting. Typically, it’s only large e-commerce websites that need dedicated hosting because they are generating a lot of traffic and processing thousands of transactions.
On a shared hosting account, server resources are shared by what could be 100 websites or more, but most websites never use anywhere near their fair share of resources. Shared hosting can be a gamble if you plan on heavily promoting your site, or if you gain traction through marketing, but until you’re actually bringing in heavy traffic, you’ll be fine with shared hosting.
Backups will get your site back online fast
If you’re thinking about getting dedicated hosting just for the higher security against hackers, that’s a good point, but is it really worth spending an extra $200 per month? That’s $2,400 per year, and $24,000 by the end of 10 years. Shared hosting will cost you around $15 per month or $180 per year, which amounts to just $1,800 over 10 years.
There’s no denying that cybersecurity is important, but most websites get hacked because of misconfigurations, user-created vulnerabilities, and social engineering. Dedicated hosting can’t protect you against any of those problems.
Creating regular backups of your website will solve all of your concerns about the potential of getting hacked. If you do get hacked, and you have a clean backup, you can restore your website quickly and easily on any web hosting account.
You can upgrade from shared to dedicated hosting
The final point to consider is that you can upgrade your hosting account at any time, as long as your provider offers dedicated servers. If saving money is important, start out with shared hosting. You don’t need to pay for a dedicated server until you actually need the resources. When you get to that point, that’s the perfect time to upgrade your hosting account. Until then, shared hosting should be more than enough for your website.