2 Types Of Services A Hosting Service Provider Offers

Posted on May 17th, 2013

There are hundreds of hosting service providers but you cannot randomly select one among the top 5 or top 10 providers. There is more that you need to consider. Let us travel back! What is your website all about? Are you building a video website like YouTube or Vimeo? If so, are you planning to post videos that you have created? Let us, for the time being, assume that you are creating videos and you want to post them on your website. Put in other words, you own the videos. Hosting service providers offer two types of server space:

1.     Shared Server.

2.     Dedicated Server.

Shared Server

The concept of shared server is simple. Let us think of a house with several rooms. Each room is occupied by a different family. So, the house becomes a shared house. A shared server is similar. The hosting service provider will have a server machine which is divided into smaller rooms or server spaces. Each of those spaces are occupied by different websites. When you buy a shared space, you actually buy a small space in that server machine which is shared by others. When you are on a shared server, you have a few limitations:

1.     When on a shared server, you cannot run any script that will eat up too much bandwidth (we will learn about bandwidth later). When that happens, other websites on the same server will not load quickly or they may not load at all for a few minutes. Your hosting service provider will not allow this.Learn more on how to build a website here.

2.     You cannot post videos directly. This means that if you are the creator of the videos, you cannot use a shared server. The reason is the same as mentioned above. Videos directly hosted on your server space will eat up too much bandwidth when your website visitors play your videos on their web browser. This will cause problem for other websites.

3.     If some other website owner runs a script or hosts videos directly, there will be high chances that you will face downtime issues. Your website may not load properly.

There are other problems too, but they are too technical to be discussed in this particular article. We will cover shared server issues separately.

Dedicated Server

The idea is simple! You don’t share. You own the entire house. Do whatever you want in your house and no one will disturb you or prevent you from doing things. Run scripts, host videos and large files, allow upload and download it is all up to you because you paid for the entire house.

Logically, a shared server is cheaper than a dedicated server. Do you really need an explanation? So, know your website before you buy your server space. There are only a handful of hosting service providers who offer dedicated server space as well as shared server space. Most of the others will offer only shared server.

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