You've made yourself a great web site. Through good design and better content, you've been able to build up a respectable amount of traffic. And then your web site is linked from Slashdot. Traffic to your site soars to levels you had only dreamed of. However, before you get the chance to benefit from your newfound popularity you exceed your bandwidth allocation and your hosting company takes your site offline. If you're relying on virtual hosting, it may be time to switch over to a dedicated hosting service.

Most people who are new to web hosting use a virtual, or shared, hosting service. In a virtual hosting service you rent space and bandwidth on a common server. Your site will be just one of many on a single physical server. More experienced users will often use a dedicated hosting service. While with virtual hosting you are pretending that you have your own server, with dedicated hosting you actually get the whole server to yourself.

Although dedicated hosting can be significantly more expensive than virtual hosting, it has many benefits. Nonetheless, dedicated hosting is not necessary for everyone. It is therefore necessary to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each type of hosting when deciding what type of hosting service is best for you.

The main benefit of using a virtual hosting service is it is fairly cheap. If you are looking for a relatively inexpensive way to get your content onto the Internet, virtual hosting is for you.

However, along with the cheaper price comes many disadvantages to using virtual hosting. Because you are sharing the server with other web sites, the amount of space and bandwidth you can use will be limited. And because you are sharing our server's resources, if one web site starts to slow down under excessive traffic or server processes, your web site's performance will also be affected.

You will also be limited in what types of software you want the server to run because you will not have any access to the server. If you want to install something on the server that is outside of the usual parameters, you will have to ask your server administrator to do it for you. And in many cases, it will not be worth the server administrators time to do it for you. Your web site will also be more vulnerable to security breaches, since a hacker just has to be able to get into one of the web sites to be able to access all the web sites on the server.

A dedicated hosting service will avoid all the disadvantages of using a virtual server. The only disadvantage to using a dedicated hosting service is the price, especially if you are not particularly knowledgeable about server upkeep and have to use a managed service.

It is important to seriously consider what your budget is and what your web site needs to be effective. If your web site is just a blog or does not have a lot of content, than it will probably not use a lot of the servers resources and you will likely be fine with virtual hosting. For complex e-commerce sites, or web sites that receive a large amount of traffic, it may be more economical in the long run to use a dedicated hosting service.

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Steve Dolan is a veteran IT Professional and webmaster who uses a multitude of hosting servises. Find out about dedicated hosting by clicking on Dedicated Hosting