Shared hosting is by far the most commonly-used form of web hosting. In a shared hosting environment, many users share the resources of a single server. But while this is more affordable because the cost of that machine is shared by multiple customers, there are other factors to consider when choosing your web hosting.

What exactly is a dedicated server? With a dedicated server there are no other users on the machine – there is no sharing. Therefore 100% of the machine’s resources “belong” to that client. This gives dedicated hosting some important advantages over shared hosting.

Dedicated servers have greater reliability than shared hosting. This is due to there is only one customer on the machine.  With shared hosting, one customer’s problems require the web hosting provider to reboot the server – bringing down the sites of everyone else hosted on that server this won’t happen on a dedicated server.

Dedicated servers are generally considered an upgrade in terms of performance over shared hosting. Because a single user controls all of the server’s resources, they can be used more efficiently to handle traffic. But on a shared server the server’s resources must be spread among the clients using it, and  some resources are wasted.

Security is another benefit – shared hosting is less secure than dedicated hosting. This is beacuse a shared server is almost always used by many independent users at once. Which means that there is no risk of security problems being caused by other users.

On a shared server, the server can’t be configured for anything other than the most common uses. However a dedicated server can be tailored to a user’s particular needs, whether it be software libraries or specialized hardware. With greater flexibility, dedicated servers can be set for specific situations, allowing for improved performance, security and reliability

Although shared hosting may be cheaper there are lots of additional factors to consider when deciding on web hosthosting.

Aric Watson
http://www.articlesbase.com/web-hosting-articles/what-is-dedicated-hosting-486648.html