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Article : Shared or dedicated Hosting
When looking for a hosting
solution for your web site you'll discover you have
the choice of shared or dedicated hosting.
This article will breifly explain the difference
between them.
Shared hosting is what it says it is. Your web site
shares a server with other web sites. You don't have
access to the other web sites files, they don't have
access to yours and you don't share a domain name.
What you do share is the machine and the scripts
that are pre-installed on it. Why would you do this?
Because it's cheaper.
As you can understand, the cost of setting up a
server machine is not inexpensive. Even relatively
large web sites are only a few hundred megabytes, so
today's computers with multiple hard drives are
easily able to handle the space. There can be as
many as one or two hundred web sites on a shared
server. You'll find there are different platforms
available in shared hosting too. You will find you
can have Unix/Linux or Windows NT/2000 as your
platform.
You don't have to choose the platform your PC is
running. This has nothing to do with what the server
needs to operate on. Unix platforms are very stable
and are perfect if you have a site using mostly HTML
pages, PHP or CGI. If you are using scripting such
as Active Server Pages, have designed your web site
using FrontPage, or need access to a Microsoft
Access or SQL Server database, you need a Windows
platform.
Shared hosting usually comes with a heap of extras
and most are included in the price.
You can get email, auto-oresponders, pre-installed
scripts including counters and mail scripts,
password protected directories, your own cgi-bin,
browser based control panels, secure directories and
more.
Check the options to see that you are getting what
you need. However, if you need complete control of
your server, you need a dedicated server.
Obviously if you're not going to share the server
with anyone, it is going to be more expensive.
Dedicated servers are usually only required by
experienced developers.
If you're not sure if you need a dedicated server,
then you probably only need shared hosting.
If you're in doubt, contact the company you are
considering hosting with and ask them about their
products in detail.
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