More About Web Hosting Differences - 3 of 3
by Mitch Keeler

Over the past two days I have done my best to try to go in further detail about the differences in the Web hosting world. We have gone into further discussion about both virtual Web hosting and reseller Web hosting and I hope you have been able to pick up a few nuggets of knowledge along the way. Now is the time to start talking about the big daddy of the Web hosting accounts, your buddy and mine, Mister dedicated Web hosting.

Doing a Google search, you can find many definitions of dedicated Web hosting. Unfortunately though none of them do a very good job of giving you a look at the big picture. For one last time, let us go back to the pumpkin pie. There's one whole pumpkin pie left. It is a few days old, but nobody has taken a slice of it just yet. Now instead of taking a piece of the pie, lets take the entire thing. That in effect is dedicated Web hosting.

If you own a dedicated Web hosting account you are usually getting an entire server to yourself. Sometimes you might share it with one or two other people. Still, that is a lot of disc space and a lot of bandwidth to go around.

What do you get? You can do just about everything you could with a virtual Web hosting account and a reseller Web hosting account. You are given a Web host control panel manager and you can divide your dedicated Web hosting plan up how you want. You could dedicate the entire thing to one huge Web site. You could resell parts of it to friends and family. You can do just about anything you would need to do.

Sounds like a Web hosting dream come true, right? Well it hits you eventually, and it hits you in the wallet. Dedicated Web hosting is very expensive, sometimes costing up to $200 or more per month. Not many individual users have that kind of money to spend, hence the reason why these types of accounts are usually left to big name companies.

Besides money though, there are a few things to look out for. When purchasing a dedicated server, you might see that it is either fully managed, semi-managed or not managed. What does this mean? A managed server means that the Web hosting company will take control of keeping your server up and running. Semi-managed means they will only do some server work, and the rest is up to you. Not managed, well, that is when all the server management is left up to you to worry about. Some of the usual server work that the Web hosting company would take care of under a managed plan is difficult and confusing. Chances are if you got a semi-managed or not managed account, you would be hiring a server administrator to take care of the back end of things.

Do you need a dedicated Web hosting plan? For the average Joe or Jack on the street, probably not. If you have ideas of having a huge Web site with millions of visitors and loads of content, then you might think about it. Just be sure to do lots of window shopping before you put down that kind of money. Also, most Web hosting companies are more than happy to answer any questions you might have about any of their dedicated Web hosting plans.

With that we have come to the last part of this three part series. I hope everybody has been able to learn a few things, or at least get a better understanding for the wacky world of Web hosting.