I was talking to gprime about this earlier, and I thought this would be a hot topic to bnng up.

He discussed the differences between co-located servers and dedicated servers, but why did he bum out shared hosting?

Shared Hosting is not a bad deal at all. All Shared Hosting is, is more than one person on one server. Many forum owners use Shared Hosting, because 99.9 % of forums don't get over populated until they reach a certain milestone.

I say If you have under 1000 members use Shared Hosting, and once you reach the 1000 member milestone, and you're getting a constant flow of traffic, than you should change.

Of course you can always upgrade your hosting package, but that might not solve all of your problems.

I think majority of forums use shared hosting, while larger, or corporate websites use dedicated servers, mainly because they have a strong user base, and the flow of traffic is always constant.

My views on this would like some feedback.

Jason F.

Don't get me wrong, I love shared hosting. It makes website owning possible for the average joe. I'll be using shared hosting. But large sites need their own server. And as such, they must choose between co-located and dedicated. So I figured we should discuss the differences.

Originally Posted by gprime

Don't get me wrong, I love shared hosting. It makes website owning possible for the average joe. I'll be using shared hosting. But large sites need their own server. And as such, they must choose between co-located and dedicated. So I figured we should discuss the differences.

Definitely. I totally agree with you on that, but I am just trying to save people money, because if you are starting a forum or website even... Would you want to spend all of that money towards the beginning on a Dedicated or even Co-Located server? I think not. Actually I would highly recommend you didn't do that. I would recommend you spend money on an average Hosting Package via Shared Hosting.

Jason F.

Right. I don't know of any site that has ever started out with dedicated or co-located. But then again, most people buying a website for the first time only know of shared hosting.

Well major companies mainly use dedicated or co-located. It is just the way it is. They also have the money to back them, so it is easy for them. I have used Dedicated Servers before and still do, while comparing the two really doesn't make much of a difference to me, unless the server is completely crowded, which is isn't most of the time.

Jason F.

Definately - large sites obviously cant use shared hosting - but for the smaller sites shared is fantastic - nice and affordable and gets the job done