Dedicated Servers... Are they different from shared hosting?

For those who have a website of their own that is getting more and more traffic each day, one of the biggest dilemmas is whether to go for dedicated servers or stick to their shared servers. For those who are starting a website and need to choose a host, consider the given questions: 

• Do you really require large bandwidths?
• Can you pay the $100 per month to the host?
• Do you have a database or a CPU intensive site?
• Do you require a specific kind of server configuration?

In case you answered most questions in the affirmative, you need a dedicated server for your site. This kind of server will cost you around $100 each month but here is a list of its benefits: 

• You have the entire machine at your disposal.
• There are no other sites eating up your resources and hence you get great performance.
• All database queries will get responses much faster.
• You are the one to have the root level control.
• You can install any software according to your needs.

The dedicated servers ensure that you have super fast connectivity between the web applications that you have and the database. The database queries are met with greater speed and efficiency if you are using this server. In fact, you can even install applications that are not allowed by shared servers. At the same time, you will not have the worries of numerous other websites eating up your resources and resulting in overcrowding.   

Shared Hosting:

But if you have a website that does not require such high resources, you can go for shared hosting that costs just about $5 to $20 a month. But since you are sharing the resources with many other sites, the pages may take a lot of time to load. However, if your site does not have any CPU intensive or database functions, then the load time won’t bother you.    

Be it shared servers or dedicated servers; you need to take care of the host you are choosing. Go for a host who has good customer services on offer. See the way they behave with you before the sale and try to gauge their standards. See if they are giving the benefits of switching to dedicated servers from a shared ones in case you need one and vice versa.