Thread: shared hosting or dedicated server?

At the moment all my sites are on $40 a year shared-type hosting schemes, with no particular problems or downtime - even for high traffic sites.

What are the benefits in changing to a dedicated server ($250 a month with my current hosting company) and are they worth the cost?

Cheers

My view is this: Don't upgrade unless you have a specific business requirement.

I am paying about $1,700/mo for a full enclosed rack and a bunch of bandwidth. If you can avoid this, I highly recommend it.

sounds like my kind of answer!
thanks

I would stick to your Shared hosting, otherwise you'll turn out somewhat like Nathan... With 30-odd servers.

Hi there,

well there are many different reasons to go / not to go with dedicated server, but its highly depends on your websites (No. of websites, Traffic of them, Value of websites in terms of your business)... So you can only decide to stick with shared hosting Or dedicated hosting...

You can read more about it at below to URLs which i quickly found for you,

Hosting Tip: Shared Versus Dedicated Web Hosting
The Great Hosting Debate: Shared vs. Dedicated

Thanks,
Hardik Vyas.

Thanks for those links, I just took a look through them.

They both end up saying shared is (usually) fine for 'small to medium sized' sites - but I guess the questions like 'how much faster would the pages load if the site had its own server' or 'how many visitors currently leave before the pages open' or even 'do google give a slight preference to a site that is not on shared hosting' are a bit trickier to answer, and are the important ones if I'm trying to work out if it's worth paying $250 a month extra.

Cheers

Originally Posted by DickTracy

Thanks for those links, I just took a look through them.

They both end up saying shared is (usually) fine for 'small to medium sized' sites - but I guess the questions like 'how much faster would the pages load if the site had its own server' or 'how many visitors currently leave before the pages open' or even 'do google give a slight preference to a site that is not on shared hosting' are a bit trickier to answer, and are the important ones if I'm trying to work out if it's worth paying $250 a month extra.

Cheers

how much faster would the pages load if the site had its own server?

It wouldn't make a difference unless your host is overselling his resources. A host who doesn't oversell his resources will be providing same speed like a completely dedicated server.

how many visitors currently leave before the pages open?

I think you should use statistical scripts to track them.

do google give a slight preference to a site that is not on shared hosting?

No but you can have dedicate new IP to each of your website to stay safe!

I agree with comments of Haris and appreciate it.

I run hosting company and provides Shared, Reseller, Dedicated server services.

I never Over sell it... In fact I keep resources within the limit and sell few accounts in one server.

Going with Reseller Plan is also one good option then dedicated server...

AS you are getting everything which you get in Dedicated server and you are Not managing anything for server support / maintenance....

You get WHM to create accounts and manage accounts.....All accounts get Cpanel to manage their hosting.

Thanks,
Hardik.

Thanks again to both of you. A couple more questions if I could.

How would I know if my host is overselling? Presumably because I'd see loading problems at certain times of day, but is there a more 'scientific' way to tell?

how many visitors currently leave before the pages open?
I think you should use statistical scripts to track them.

I use google analytics - is there actually a way to tell if someone left before the page loaded? I would have thought that either the loading gets as far as the statistics javascript and includes it as a pageview, or it doesn't - and the stats would know nothing about the pageview. Perhaps I could try and look for differences between server (awstats) level stats and analytics, but that sounds a bit time-consuming!

Cheers

Hi,

I think the one way of checking that your Hosting company not overselling their resources is,

If you have cpanel access then there should be one option in cpanel left column "Server Status"

This number tells you the average consumption of the system resources.

You should mainly check three things there,

1. Server load - This will show load at the time you are checking.
2. memory used (this is RAM) - Same as above.. it will show memory usage at the time you are checking.

3. hard drive consumption (this should be showing as (/) or (/home) ) - This can give you some hints that how much its used. If its around 50% then it should be Ok i think.

Thanks,
Hardik Vyas.