Dedicated hosting means renting a whole physical server for your own use: no other customer shares its processor, memory, storage or network port, and you usually get full administrative access. You need it when a workload is too heavy, too sensitive or too specialised to share hardware. Most small business websites run well on shared hosting or a VPS for far less money.<\/p>\n
A hosting provider owns servers in a data centre with backup power, cooling and network connections. With dedicated hosting, one of those machines is assigned to you. You choose the hardware (processor, RAM and disks), the operating system and the data centre location from the configurations the provider offers.<\/p>\n
The provider looks after the building, power, network and the replacement of failed hardware. What happens on the server itself depends on the service level you buy:<\/p>\n
Before you buy, get in writing who handles hardware replacement, operating system updates, security patching, monitoring, backups and troubleshooting. Gaps in that list are where outages and breaches happen.<\/p>\n
All three host websites and applications. The difference is how the hardware is divided and who runs it. If the basics are new to you, start with what web hosting is and how it works<\/a>.<\/p>\n
| <\/th>\n | Shared hosting<\/th>\n | VPS<\/th>\n | Dedicated server<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware<\/td>\n | Many websites on one server<\/td>\n | A virtual machine on a shared physical server<\/td>\n | A whole physical server for one customer<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Resources<\/td>\n | Shared, within account limits<\/td>\n | Allocated cores, RAM and disk<\/td>\n | Every core, all RAM and full disk speed<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Access<\/td>\n | Control panel such as cPanel<\/td>\n | Full root access<\/td>\n | Full root or administrator access<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Who runs the server<\/td>\n | The provider<\/td>\n | You, unless managed<\/td>\n | You, unless managed<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Scaling<\/td>\n | Upgrade the plan<\/td>\n | Often resized quickly<\/td>\n | New hardware or a migration<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Set-up time<\/td>\n | Usually instant<\/td>\n | Minutes to hours<\/td>\n | Hours to weeks, depending on hardware<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Cost<\/td>\n | Lowest<\/td>\n | Moderate<\/td>\n | Highest<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Suits<\/td>\n | Most small business sites and blogs<\/td>\n | Growing sites, shops and developers<\/td>\n | Heavy, sensitive or specialised workloads<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n A dedicated server is not automatically faster than every VPS. Performance depends on the processor generation, memory, storage, network and how the software is configured. A modern VPS with dedicated cores can outperform an older dedicated machine.<\/p>\n Who needs a dedicated server?<\/h2>\n |