Shared Hosting vs. Dedicated Hosting: Which Is Best for Your Business?

So, you’ve heard of shared hosting and dedicated hosting, but you want to know which is the right solution for you. Here’s the short version: Shared hosting is when you rent a small piece of someone else’s computer to put your website on. Dedicated hosting is when you rent an entire physical server to host multiple websites or other services.

We’ll be going over how to choose one or the other based on price, your use case, the kind of traffic you expect, and more.

Shared hosting vs. dedicated hosting overview

Here’s the quick, side-by-side comparison of these two types of hosting. There are more factors to consider, of course, but these are the main ones.

Features	Shared hosting	Dedicated hosting
Scalability	Medium	High – depends on the host
Performance	Low to medium	High
Pricing	Low	High
Flexibility	Medium	High
Reliability	Medium to high	High
Security	High	Mostly depends on you
Support	Medium – depends on the host	Low to high – depends on the hosting plan
Use case	Simple site hosting Low traffic	Host multiple websites High traffic and CPU usage

What is shared hosting?

With shared hosting, your website shares a server with other websites run by multiple users. They all use the same server resources, and the hosting company handles server maintenance, hardware, and software updates, so you don’t need advanced technical skills. Shared hosting packages might come with automated installers for WordPress and other CMS options, or site builders.

What is dedicated hosting?

With dedicated server hosting, you choose from a list of available hardware specs and rent an entire server. Depending on the hosting plan you choose, this dedicated server may come with a built-in control panel for easy management, or you may have to set everything up via the command line.

Shared vs. dedicated hosting differences

All right, let’s go into the differences, but in a little more detail:

Scalability

Dedicated hosting wins in this category, as it’s hard to beat having the option of having the hosting company put more RAM and more storage into your server. This depends on the host, as some shared hosting plans can scale quite high.

Performance

Most of the time, dedicated hosting offers top-tier performance. These services are better at handling more resource-intensive scenarios like high-traffic sites, game servers, and one guy I knew even used them for weather calculations. The resources on a dedicated server are all yours, and if someone else’s site gets DDoSed, it doesn’t affect you.

Pricing

Shared hosting wins by a landslide. In short, renting a small piece of a server is always going to be a more cost-effective option than renting the whole thing.

Flexibility

While shared hosting has been fairly flexible on hosts that still offer classic cPanel (and similar) plans, dedicated servers are more or less under your full control. Even with a managed server, you can install whatever you want.

Reliability

Once again, dedicated servers win because the whole server is under your control. Not having to share CPU, RAM, or storage space with anyone else reduces the number of things that can go wrong. Also, with shared hosting, limited resources can cause slower performance due to other sites’ traffic.

Security

This sort of depends. Shared hosting is mostly reasonably secure these days, with web hosts offering enhanced security measures to prevent breaches. If you get a managed dedicated server (where the provider takes care of the hosting environment), you’ll get a similar experience.

If you're in charge of server management, it's all up to you, which may introduce security concerns. You could lock it down so much that not even you can access it.

Support

Again, this depends. Shared hosting customers sometimes get the short end of the stick when it comes to support, but it’s usually all right. For dedicated hosting, support can range from basically nonexistent to a fully managed experience where you can ask the web hosting company to install anything you want.

Use case

Dedicated hosting wins out for anyone who needs more: more dedicated resources, more performance, more control, more traffic, and whatever else you can think of. Thus, they’re often used for large businesses and sites. And people who want to do weather calculations, for some reason.

For most people and businesses, though, shared hosting is more than enough.

Best web hosting services

So you’ve chosen between shared and dedicated hosting. But which web hosting company is right for you? Well, you’re in luck. We’ve looked into which hosting provider is the best for each type.

Shared hosting services

• Bluehost has a long history of offering reliable shared hosting at solid prices.
• Hostinger offers an easy-to-use experience for new website owners setting up their first site.
• DreamHost offers very reasonable prices, great website performance, and a custom, human-made site with any annual plan.

Dedicated hosting services

• IONOS is the granddaddy of web hosting companies (well, one of them). It offers your choice of AMD, Intel, and even ARM servers. You can also opt for dedicated resources, such as storage servers or GPU-equipped servers for extra processing power.
• DreamHost also specializes in fully managed dedicated servers, which means you don’t need to take care of server maintenance. You can ask the DreamHost team to build you the server of, well, your dreams.
• Interserver is a host I personally used to run my own server for Ark: Survival Evolved, and it ran butter-smooth. Anyone who’s run an Ark server can tell you that’s no small feat.

FAQs

Bottom line

Shared hosting is good for small businesses and smaller sites, and it makes it easy to just set your site up and get started. Dedicated hosting is for high-traffic, resource-heavy websites, but requires more technical skills.

Check out our hosting reviews and guides to what web hosting should cost to help you decide which shared or dedicated host is right for you.