Shared vs. Dedicated: Why it’s challenging for Medium-Sized Businesses to Choose
Shared vs. Dedicated: Why it’s challenging for Medium-Sized Businesses to Choose

One of the hardest challenges that medium-sized businesses face is choosing between dedicated and shared servers. Although Web Hosting Dubai offers many reasonable choices for SMBs (Small-Medium-sized businesses), the choice generally comes down to shared or dedicated servers. The confusion arises because businesses will have to consider both their present and future needs before making the choice. 

This article will serve as a guide to making that choice easier. For this, we will analyze the features of both hosting solutions. 

Disk Space & Bandwidth

You may have seen advertisements about shared hosting solutions featuring unlimited bandwidth and storage space. This is actually impractical because web hosting solutions, technically, always have limits. By ‘unlimited’, what most providers actually mean is that you can use a pre-determined amount of space, and add more on the go. It’s up to the provider to determine the amount of space you can use at a particular point of time. So it’s better to make a decision based on the volume of traffic your website receives.  

Things are different when it comes to dedicated hosting. This option is ideal for those websites that receive a huge volume of traffic. Many web hosts are actually capable of providing unlimited bandwidth for dedicated hosting solutions. 

Security

In a shared hosting environment, your website will be on a shared server i.e. there will be other websites in the same server. Such a mechanism makes it quite obvious that the security aspect won’t be too impressive. The server itself may crash if there is one bad script running on it. You won’t be aware of the kind of websites that are sharing the server with you. 

In dedicated servers, security is absolute. That’s one of the reasons why it’s more expensive than shared hosting plans. The web host will be constantly monitoring the server to make sure that everything’s running fine. In addition, the server is dedicated to hosting your website alone. You will also be able to run almost all kinds of software and scripts. 

Performance

Performance matters a lot when you are trying to run a business through your website. The better the website performs, the more satisfied visitors will be. So basically, the performance factor is directly proportional to the visitor experience factor. 

That said, you are aware that your website will be sharing the server with many other websites in a shared environment, quite similar to renting an apartment in a building with many other tenants. All websites in the server will be sharing the resources of the server. Suppose if one of those websites execute a solid search engine optimization campaign resulting in a significant increase in traffic. That website will consequently use more resources to handle the traffic, leaving your website with less. This affects your website’s performance. 

Similar performance drops are totally absent in a dedicated server, because it houses only your website. As mentioned before, dedicated servers are ideal for websites with a large volume of traffic. You need not be concerned about downtime either. 

Control

If you don’t want to bother with managing and controlling everything associated to the server, and if your website doesn’t receive a lot of traffic, shared hosting is the way to go. There are drawbacks to this though. There could be limitations on certain types of scripting language. You won’t be able to use advanced applications to run on your site either. 

A dedicated server, on the other hand, gives you great control over the server resources. However to properly assume control and manage the server, you are required to have some amount of technical knowledge and experience. Dedicated servers also allow the users to customize the hosting environment to their liking, and use the applications and scripts they want to use. 

Cost

When it comes to affordability, shared hosting plans take the prize; another reason why most small businesses and bloggers choose shared hosting plans. You can find plans with very cheap price tags. But don’t expect good performance from most of them. There are gems among such plans though. 

Dedicated hosting offers many benefits but they come at a price – it’s quite expensive. You get more control and security than shared hosting solutions, and good technical support as well. Minor technical issues are handled by the support team without impacting your website’s performance. However, in some cases when the server experiences major problems, the user may have to pay more. 

So basically, shared hosting is ideal for business with a low budget, and just need a platform to start running the website. They can upgrade to a better plan once the website starts to receive good traffic. Dedicated servers are for premium users who either have websites with huge volumes of traffic or for those who values performance of the website more.