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Web Hosting - Shared vs. Dedicated Hosting Options

There are a few considerations to make when choosing the right hosting arrangement to fit your needs. Below you will find information to help guide that decision.

Shared Hosting

In a Shared Hosting setup many sites can reside together on a individual server with each domain segregated (sand-boxed) within its own private space with dedicated IP's.   This can be a great cost benefit because most sites only require a small portion of a server's overall resources.

This allows for hundreds of sites coexisting successfully on a single server and with the uniformity there is complete technical documentation, direct support from your campus colleagues and excellent up-time.  The standardization also allows for rapid deployment of a diversity of websites.  Whether you require a basic, static site or are running many of the popular open source software such as: WordPress, Drupal, Moodle, etc. to custom applications, we got you covered. 


Dedicated Hosting

The Shared Web Hosting option is an ideal, cost-effective solution for most affiliates.  However there are certain situations where having your own dedicated server is a better fit: 
  • High-traffic or resource-intensive sites that want the full, dedicated resources of a server.
  • High availability options with clustering of servers and/or fail-over protections
  • The need to dictate when planned maintenance, or other security and operating system (OS) patching will take place
  • Complete control of the server to set up and manage however you see fit (for example, installing third-party applications on the server OS)

Please see Campus Cloud Infrastructure (CCI) for more information: https://it.wisc.edu/services/campus-cloud-infrastructure-cci/


Have questions?  Please contact us at webhosting@doit.wisc.edu



Keywords:
shared community dedicated sandboxed, domains, IP, scalability, high availability 
Doc ID:
47453
Owned by:
Jake S. in DoIT Web Hosting
Created:
2015-02-20
Updated:
2024-02-29
Sites:
DoIT Web Hosting