What would you prefer?
 

Dedicated hosting or shared hosting? Besides the price and based on experience, how would you compare the two?

Dedicated hosting is always preferred over shared hosting because it guarantees resources to you and your sites. Shared hosting however has gotten a very bad reputation from providers who over subscribe the service.

The same can happen to a dedicated server if the hosting company over subscribes the network link. Your dedicated server happily processes your site but can barely send the data to the surfer.

So it really boils down to the infrastructure and the service levels that the hosting company uses to provide their services. If you're talking about not over subscribed service then the offerings are nearly identical, but depend on how big your site is.

Sometimes you just use more resources than a shared hosting account can provide. Finally to wrap it up - shared hosting does have an inherent problem. Sometimes everything can be flowing smoothly, until a different customer on the same shared server makes a mistake and uploads a bad script, or runs a very CPU heavy process. Depending on the shared server environment this bad process can affect your site.

I would say start with shared when you're starting out and move to dedicated as soon as you can afford to pay for it - so your business can grow unhampered.

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As a side note now a days there are 2 types of shared hosting accounts. 1 is the virtual hosting account, where a server hosts multiple customers in the same OS.

The second which is gaining heavy popularity is VPS, Virtual Private Server, or VM - Virtual Machine. This allows a dedicated server to split its hardware resources and 'dedicate' them to a virtual machine. This is really the best of both worlds, provided that the hosting company does not over subscribe the physical hardware. Its the best because it gives you the control and flexibility of a dedicated server, but the pricing is closer to shared.

Dedicated all the way! My own box, no one mess on it, stuff works smooth. I pay the price but the quality is worth it!

I prefer managed dedicated so I can submit tickets and work on other things besides admining a box. I do have VPS accounts at a number of hosts for less intensive sites and projects.