Web hosting for small businesses - shared or dedicated?

When you are looking to set up a website for your business, you will be faced with several hosting options. Before signing up for any type of hosting service, you need to work out your requirements and ensure you get the service your site needs, and at a fair price.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of web hosting you can sign up for: Shared, Dedicated, and Managed Dedicated service plans.

Shared Hosting

A shared hosting service (or ‘virtual hosting’ service) will host a large number of individual websites on a single server. Most websites are hosted this way, and prices are typically low as you will be sharing the services of the server with a number of other sites. Sometimes hundreds of websites are hosting on a single shared server. You can easily sign up to a shared service for under £100 per year.

Shared hosting would suit many small businesses – especially those that do not have, or do not want to get involved in the more technical aspects of running their own web server.

With a typical shared hosting account, you can be up and running in minutes. Once your domain name has been pointed towards your web hosting account, you can simply upload files and manage your email accounts with ease – typically via some type of user friendly “control panel”.

You should expect to receive customer and technical support for a shared hosting account, although the quality of this support can vary significantly between hosting providers.

Dedicated Hosting

A dedicated server would host a single or a small number of sites. The cost of signing up to such a service is understandably much higher than the shared service option – typically from £500 to several thousand pounds per year, depending on the specification of server you sign up for.

With a dedicated hosting service, you will typically be expected to take care of all the technical aspects of running a web server yourself – meaning that you will need to have in-house technical expertise to manage the server.

If you need more control over your web applications and of the server in general, and/or need to cater for a large number of site visitors, then the dedicated route is probably more suited to your needs. Typically, businesses that require a dedicated server will have access to the technical expertise they need to maintain it, or they may opt to use a managed service provider to oversee the technical aspects of running a dedicated server.

Managed Service Hosting

For companies that require a dedicated web server, but also need help with the day-to-day running of the server, managed service hosting may be a sensible option. For an extra monthly fee, some hosting providers will take your server maintenance off your hands.

Typical maintenance tasks would include: server administration, installing software, implementing security, backing up data and managing data storage.

Choosing a web hosting supplier

Once you have decided which type of hosting would suit your business, there are a number of other key issues to bear in mind when choosing a web host – read our dedicated guide here.