Shared or Managed Hosting- Know the Right Fit for You

Merely registering a name for your website is not enough. You need to get it hosted to make it active and live on the internet. Web hosting means buying a space to store the content and files of your website so that it becomes visible to people using the internet. A variety of web hosting options are available for customers with plans offering shared hosting and dedicated or managed hosting. The choice between these types of hosting will depend on the nature and size of a website, the budget for making and maintaining a website, its requirements for server space, storage & bandwidth, and the level of security.

Identifying Your Requirements

Once you have decided to set up a website for promoting or publicizing your business or starting your own blog for sharing essential information or tips, you need to follow it up with some planning about the size and content.

• Storage Requirements – A simple blog site may be easy to set up and maintain with little requirement for storage and bandwidth. Since the traffic is expected to be low in the initial days, resource requirements are limited. However, if you are launching a commercial or e-commerce website for selling your products, your resource requirement will be much higher. You will need adequate storage space and bandwidth to upload your pages, videos and images, besides plugins to handle customer queries and data.
• Funds Availability – Again, new businesses tend to have budget constraints and thus limited funds available for hosting a website. However, e-commerce websites or websites that need to display images and videos to attract visitors will need to spend more on hosting and maintaining the website.
• Security Requirements– Commercial websites or content-heavy websites may require adequate security and cannot afford to lose or leak the personal data and the data of their customers. This requires hosting services that include adequate security of the website and its content.

A clear idea about your budget and server & security requirements will help you choose from the various shared hosting plans and dedicated server hosting in India.

Choosing Between Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting

Shared hosting plans include access to a server for hosting your website, but the catch here is that the same server is used by not one but several websites. This means the bandwidth and storage on the server are being used by several websites at the same time. This, however, also means the absence of privacy and chances of security breaches. Also, any fault in any other website running on the same server can negatively impact the running or maintenance of your website.

In case the resource requirements of your website are high, and you require a high security hosting system, opt for dedicated managed hosting plans. These plans ensure that your website runs on a dedicated server with the maintenance part being handled by the hosting service provider. Another deciding factor for choosing between shared hosting and managed hosting is the cost involved. Since dedicated hosting means sole access to a server, it is costlier than the shared hosting plan which allocates one server to several websites.