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This article will explain the key differences between 2 web hosting services available today: shared and dedicated web hosting.

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting is very popular and the most common type of hosting used by websites on the Internet today.

Shared hosting is very cost effective, because you are sharing hosting with maybe 100 other websites on a single, powerful server.

Shared hosting offer just about all your site needs in terms of space, bandwidth, email, etc. You can even order different IP addresses for each of your websites with shared hosting.

The benefits of shared hosting is low cost (average price is around $5 month per website), your own domain name and lots of software options like database, CGI, etc. If you run a small business and don't expect more than 1000 visitors to your website per day, then shared hosting is for you.

The only problem with shared hosting is that bandwidth is limited, so if your site becomes very popular you might find yourself running out of bandwidth quickly.

If you ever wanted to test the waters and put your own website up on the Internet, start with shared hosting and your own domain - its the way to go.

What is dedicated hosting?

Dedicated hosting is the opposite of shared hosting. Dedicated hosting is about you being in total control of the server and what goes on the server. You decide whether to host 1 site or 10 of your sites.

Dedicated hosting allows you to tailor database, email and software applications to your desire - so it works the way you want it to. This is powerful.

Dedicated hosting is ideal for websites with high traffic and large businesses who want complete control over the server so they can fine tune for special shopping cart software, etc.

Another benefit of dedicated hosting is you can resell the space/bandwidth to people who want to setup their own website.

Unlike shared hosting, dedicated hosting will cost considerably more, something like $50 month for a simple dedicated server.

If your website is critical to your business, then I'd highly recommend dedicated hosting.