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Considering the best hosting options is important to both your site’s health/wellness, as well as your visitor’s experience. As with many other services less expensive equates to fewer services and in many cases lower opportunities. When choosing your hosted environment it is important to consider the following perks of dedicated/VP hosting versus shared hosting (lower costs and lower resource-based hosting services). Here are a few reasons why hosting clients who are serious about uptime, availability, and performance tend to choose a dedicated/VP server instead of a shared solution.
Items to consider: Speed and Response Time, Protection from Your Neighbors, Flexibility of Resources, IP Address and Search Ranking, Uptime
Bandwidth, Security and Value of Your Website
 
1. Dedicated or VP Server = Faster Response and Lead-time
Sharing a server means you are sharing and competing with others for memory, hard drive/storage space, processor resources, and other software resources, which can increase the time it takes to respond to your visitors request. If a quick and accurate response to your website is a high priority, dedicated hosting can provide better results by allowing your website to utilize all the available resources of your hosting server/space. A dedicated/VP server’s resources are yours and yours alone to use as needed and in most cases are upgradeable.

 
2. Protection from Other People’s Mishaps
In a shared hosting environment, your site runs on a server or shared grid of servers that may be hosting hundreds sometimes even thousands of other websites without your knowledge. Some websites may be running as untested code that crashes the server or steal resources from other site, or even worse — it may be running un-patched software that creates security holes exploitable by hackers which effect their site as well as your website. Your code and environment deserve and rely on the necessary resources to avoid downtime, needless to say, to avoid becoming exploited or blacklisted.

 
3. Flex Your Muscles and Resources
In a shared hosting environment, installing new software in order to increase the capabilities of your website can take additional time and may be limited based on the hosting provider. Scheduling maintenance downtime can be even trickier, as few other clients sharing a server will want their websites taken offline for the sake of someone else’s improvements.
A dedicated/VP hosting environment solves all of these problems by making your website the sole owner for that server, giving you much greater control over what is installed, what/when changes can be made and when maintenance can be performed.

 
4. The Power of Owning Your Own IP Address
All websites that share a hosting environment (shared hosting) on a single server also share that server’s IP address. If one of the websites on your shared hosting account is placed on a black list due to sending spam or hosting questionable content — this will affect all of the websites on that same server. Do you have a plan in place if your site/sites become blacklisted due to the actions of your neighbors? Here’s an in-depth look at dedicated vs. shared IP addresses. With a dedicated hosting environment, your IP address is used only by you, and you don’t have to worry about what neighbors may be doing next door. Don’t go the cheap route and get your IP banned by the email servers or search engines as this affects your SEO and ranking capabilities as well.

 
5. More Uptime Less Downtime
Most customers do not realize that by having many sites on one dedicated box, the probability of more downtime is multiplied exponentially, due to rogue/exploited scripts, DDOS attacks, traffic spikes, viruses, maintenance or lack of maintenance, and just less attention to the server’s health. Many dedicated hosting providers guarantee 99.95% uptime and most of the time they deliver. In addition, there is a vast difference between the responsibility and the support time/services between dedicated/VP hosting verses shared hosting.

 
6. Bandwidth without Penalties
One of the quickest ways to turn a cheap shared hosting contract into an expensive mistake is to exceed the allotted bandwidth allowed to your website. Since websites in a shared hosting arrangement must share the bandwidth of a single server they are held to strict billing plans with sizable overage penalties. The same bandwidth rules apply if you have a script that continues to run or cycle on a daily basis. Some hosting companies is known to cancel your account altogether due to higher than average bandwidth usage or huge traffic spikes.

 
7. Better Security and Control
Having your own dedicated server also provides better security and a more hardened barrier between legitimate visitors and hackers. The configuration of your own firewall, controlling which software packages will be installed, and the code of your website are all under your control. No one will be able to hack into your account because of another site’s vulnerability, exploited code or virus. Also, most dedicated/VP hosting providers provide backups of both your website and data.

 
8. Managed vs. Un-Managed
This speaks for itself, shared hosting is in most cases 100% client-managed. You manage it and when things go south – you own the problem (basically giving your responsibility without authority). If your site is blacklisted, exploited or affected by your neighbors – it is your responsibility to recover your environment, files or in most cases relaunch your site on another hosting platform. With dedicated/VP hosting the cost of maintenance and recovery is included in the costs of your hosting.