Posted by Jerry in 
Selecting a good hosting service is a matter of great concern. When it comes to select between a virtual and a dedicated service, many of the newbie webmasters get confused. Identifying the difference between the two may make it easy for them to find out the best type of hosting.
Best identification of differences will be to outline the advantages and disadvantages of Virtual hosting and Dedicated Hosting, and here it goes:
Virtual Hosting
Advantages
- Available at cheaper rates: Shared hosting being the most common and much demanded type of hosting is available at low rates.
Disadvantages
- Slow Server Response: Since your site is sharing resources with many other sites hosted at the same server, there may be a slow response time.
- IP Sharing: Shared IP addresses may not be big issues, but just identifies the other sites hosted on same server.
- Bad Neighborhood: Sometimes you don’t want to be linked with or associated with some sort of sites, i.e. adult content, gambling sites etc, but in case of shared hosting, there’s a possibility that such sites are hosted on the same server your site is.
Dedicated Hosting
Advantages
- Your own dedicated server: This provides you with a space that’s completely yours, i.e. only your sites are there and nothing else.
- No bandwidth issues: Since there’re no other sites that may delay the server response time, and the specific resources are allocated just to your site, there’s no bandwidth issue.
Disadvantages
- High Cost: The only disadvantage of dedicated hosting is that it’s very expensive!
What Should I Have, Shared or Dedicated Hosting?
From the above differences, it’s very clear that virtual hosting is quite OK for you, if you don’t have a high traffic site. Dedicated hosting is a solution, if you’re having a high traffic site, The other issues like bad neighborhood and IP sharing thing can, however, be managed by finding a quality web hosting service that doesn’t allow such content plus offers unique IPs.
For instant help, here’s a list down of shared hosting plans from reputable web host. Check out the price and general features, as well as my personal recommendation.
| Web Hosting Services | Disk Storage | Bandwidth | Price | Free domain? |
| 1-and-1 | 250 GB | 2,500 GB | $9.99 | Yes |
BlueHost  |
Unlimited | Unlimited | $6.95 | Yes |
| HostMonster |
Unlimited | Unlimited | $6.95 | Yes |
| Hostgator | 350 GB | 3,500 GB | $4.95 | Yes |
| HostRocket | 1,000 GB | Unlimited | $5.95 | Yes |
| LunarPages |
1,500 GB | 15,000 GB | $4.95 | Yes |
| Web Hosting Pad | Unlimited | Unlimited | $3.96 | Yes |
| Dot 5 Hosting | Unlimited | Unlimited | $3.95 | Yes |
| iPower | 1,500 GB | 15,000 GB | $7.95 | Yes |
| Fat Cow | 1,500 GB | 15,000 GB | $7.33 | No |
Remarks:
- = recommended for shared web hosting.
- Click on the host name to visit them online.
What’s next?
We have learned about the different between dedicated server and shared server. However do you know that the hosting world is also separated to major two by the type of operating systems? Yeah, that’s right, you might already heard of them – Linux and Windows. Let’s move on to our next class: Windows Hosting vs Unix Hosting
