Shared Vs. Dedicated Web Hosts

One of the first steps when advertising your plastic surgery practice on the Internet is choosing a web hosting company to host your website. This is a very important decision because your web host can make or break your site depending on their level of service and responsiveness. When making this choice, you have the option of going with a shared web host in which you share space on the same server with other sites, or you can go with a dedicated web host, which is basically having a server of your own.

Every server that connects to the Internet has its own unique IP address. You can choose a hosting account that either has its own server or shares a server with other websites. With your own dedicated server you have your own IP address. With a shared server, you share the IP address with other websites. Most websites that are small to medium in size typically reside on a shared web host, while larger or very busy sites often have their own dedicated host. Both options have positive and negatives.

Shared hosts, also known as virtual hosts, are generally much more affordable than dedicated hosts. In fact, it’s even possible to get free web hosting. On the other hand, when search engines ban sites for spam, they often ban the entire IP address. As such, if you’re sharing a host with known spam sites, such as an adult site, your own site may very well be banned by association. It’s important that you ask any potential hosting company what types of sites they allow on their servers and if they can offer an individual IP address for different sites on the same server. In addition, shared hosts can involve slower server response times, particularly if you’re sharing the server with a lot of very busy sites. Be sure to ask the potential host how many sites they have on each server and how much traffic those sites receive. Shared hosts can also have more server crashes. Nevertheless, shared hosts are very popular and work well for the majority of websites on the Internet. You just have to be certain to choose your shared host carefully.

Dedicated Web hosts cost more than shared ones, but they do have their advantages. For starters, the IP address is yours and yours alone. You don’t have to worry about having it banned by the search engines because of the actions of others. Further, you don’t have to worry about another site causing your server to crash or slowing down your response time. In addition, your website can be as large as you want it to be, whereas virtual hosts often have a penalty if you over a certain amount of bandwidth. Despite all these great benefits, however, the added cost of a Dedicated Web host simply may not be justifiable for a smaller website.