Shared Hosting vs. Dedicated Hosting
One Web hosting question that crops up a lot is what exactly is “shared hosting” or “dedicated hosting”, and which is best for affiliate marketing.
Shared hosting is by far the most common and is what most people are familiar with, as far as what you see offered at sites like HostGator, AN Hosting, and GoDaddy. These packages are very affordable (often less than $10/month) and come with lots of bells and whistles, as far as letting you put unlimited domains on your site, create unlimited mySQL databases, and provide lots of storage and bandwidth.
The reason they’re called “shared” hosting packages (and the reason that they’re so affordable) is that your websites are stored on a server with many other customers, most of which are exactly in the same boat you are. They may have one site, a handful of sites, or even 20+ sites in their accounts, but they’re not high-traffic sites, getting a ginormous amount of traffic. This lets hosting providers put a ton of these sites on a single server without any huge downside, as the cumulative traffic and load on the server is kept to a reasonable amount, due to the nature of the sites.
While most of us don’t by nature like to share, there’s usually no downside, as far as your sites being up and open for business. Occasionally a site on a shared server will suddenly get a huge spike of unexpected traffic and this will cause all of the sites on that server (including those owned by complete strangers like you) to bog down or become inaccessible, but it’s a pretty rare occurence and most hosts provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee and will refund you for any time your site was down or inaccessible.
One nice thing about shared plans is that they’re completely managed for you by the hosting provider, as far as security and support, and you have to know very little to get up and running.
As mentioned, shared hosting plans start off really cheap but can scale up to reasonably expensive plans, if you have lots of sites and get a decent amount of traffic. Some people like the fact that they’re completely managed by someone else, so some customers stay on shared hosting plans, even when they have tons of sites and tons of traffic, and simply upgrade to plans that provide more storage and bandwidth (which still share a server with other sites but typically with fewer other customer accounts).
Dedicated hosting is a bit different. They’re similar in nature, as far as paying a hosting provider for space on a server, but in this case you have the entire server dedicated to your sites and don’t share space with any other customers. This guarantees better performance for popular, high-traffic sites, and it also usually means you have greater control over your sites, as you often have more direct access to the server management.
It depends on the host and what licenses they have, but with dedicated packages you typically get access to WHM and cPanel interfaces, that let you handle many routine tasks associated with your server. With shared plans you often have to request a new domain or new mySQL database to be offered, creating a ticket for it, and waiting on support to take care of it; all those steps can be done yourself in seconds on a typical dedicated hosting account.
You’ll also often get the added perk of being able to act as a reseller through your dedicated hosting account, which simply means that you can add customers beneath you, who pay you for hosting their sites on your server, just as if they’d signed up for a normal shared hosting account.
Dedicated hosting packages can be managed or unmanaged, as far as whether you get a lot of support and security help or whether you’re essentially on your own, as far as ensuring that the lastest versions of scripts and programs are up-to-date and secure on your server. Because of all the nice perks and bonuses, dedicated plans are a good bit more expensive, starting at around $100/month for the cheapest unmanaged plans and around $200/month for managed dedicated server packages.
As far as what’s best for affiliate marketing, if you’re just starting out, you should always go with shared hosting. Always. We all start out with grand plans but it’ll likely take you years until you grow your sites and traffic to the point that a dedicated plan makes sense. While switching plans or hosts can be annoying, it’s not rocket science, so there’s no reason to start out with a bigger package than you need for the foreseeable future, as you can always expand or switch later when the need arises.
Shared Hosting vs. Dedicated Hosting and related information can be found in Getting Started, Web hosting