Sooner or later your online business will grow and hosting your website on the same server with another 200 websites will not make it for you. It is a known fact that people tend to leave sooner pages that are loading very slowly.

If you have a simple website, for example a product page or a presentation page then the loading speed can be very high even on low bandwidth hosting, but if you have a more complex website: a blog with a lot of content, a membership based website, a community, then the loading speed can be very low even with low traffic on a shared hosting and you should consider moving to a dedicated server.

Why shared hosting is not for you

Most companies that offer you shared hosting ( popular ones especially ) will host your website on the same machine with another 200 websites. That’s because the running costs are high and they have to sign a lot of contracts for 3$/month to cover their expenses. Their intention is not to ripe you off, but there are real costs associated with the running of a web hosting company and if you pay a very low amount you should expect a proportional quality.

If you just want to have a place holder website with your photo and some links, then it is ok to go shared, but if you really want to grow your website a lot then a dedicated server may be the solution for you. As you already know, google put a lot of weight on speed in it’s ranking algorithm, and there is a high change that your website will rank higher and you will get more visitors if your website load speed will increase. You can increase your loading speed by optimizing your website  (which you can do to a certain level only ) and to get a better hosting.

Why a dedicated hosting is better

If you website is dynamic, and this is the case of almost all websites on the web, and content is taken from a database and then processed to be shown to the end user, the server where it is hosted require a good processing speed to deliver the data. This is the case of most websites. If you have the website hosted on the same server with another 200, then the processing speed is divided among all, resulting in a very low processing speed for your server in peak hours. On a dedicated server you are alone with your dedicated processing speed.

Dedicated bandwidth and unique IP. On a dedicated hosting plan you will get a unique IP, so you can be sure that your website and email server won’t be blacklisted on spam filters just because another client signed up for shared hosting just to spam. Even if the hosting company prohibits spam and they ban the account, he is still able to send a great number of spam messages that will get the IP blacklisted already.

On a dedicated server you will have your own bandwidth and you can be sure that your website success is directly determined by your actions and not because your shared hosting is very slow or because some other guy wants to spam the entire web.