Most web hosting companies offer shared hosting, under which they offer packages by disk space, bandwidth, number of websites, databases, and email address etc. Shared web hosting is a lot cheaper as compared to dedicated web hosting.

It is very important to understand your website requirements and choose an appropriate hosting plan in order to run a successful website. Read the following comparison to easily understand your requirements.

Basic Difference

A shared server hosts form 200 to 500 websites normally. So all websites on a shared hosting server are sharing the CPU, bandwidth, and memory resources. This can result in slow speed of your website and downtime.

A dedicated web server is just for you. You can host as many websites as you want on it or host a single one. Large-scale websites require a collation of dedicated servers (even 1 server is not enough for them). A dedicated server helps run websites smooth and fast.

Control Comparison

A shared hosting server provides you a server management software with which you manage your website. Most of the time this software is CPANEL. You do not have root access to the server to install additional software’s.

On a dedicated server you have complete control. You can even install operating system of your choice. Data centers also offer to install the software’s of your choice. You have root admin control on your server and operate it as you like.

Server Management

For shared hosting you do not need to worry about server management. The server is managed by the data center (hosting company).

Dedicated servers are offered by data centers on self-management or managed by the data center. If you acquire managed servers you pay almost 50% extra to the server price. In most cases we acquire a dedicated web server from a solid data center and handle it ourselves.

Price Comparison

Shared web hosting for one or more websites are available from US$5 to US$7 per month.

Dedicated web hosting server (single server) is available from US$100 to US$500 per month, depending on the specifications of the server hardware, bandwidth & IPs required.

Final Conclusion

Shared hosting is suitable for personal and small-scale (low traffic) websites.

Dedicated hosting is suitable for corporate, large scale, e-commerce and community websites (high traffic).

YouTube Video Attached
We found an interesting YouTube Video on Hosting Types. You will find it of interest. Virtual hosting account is the shared hosting account we are talking about on top. A virtual private server is also a shared hosting account where there are other virtual web hosting accounts are also setup along with yours.

Servers were always covering major portion of internet. We need servers for everything Gaming, Websites, businesses, Shopping online etc. Most of the people would be considering a server machine as some super machine which it is not. Let’s start with what servers are:

1. They are computers just like we use at our home but with good specifications.
2. They are on high speed internet (Here our home computers differ from servers).
3. They are used for specific reasons could be a gaming server or a web server.
4. The server is optimized to perform services for other computers or clients.

Let’s talk about the web servers, which are used to run a single or several websites on them. First of all you going to choose a server which is on a good internet connection and has a good bandwidth limits too. Now days you can see servers with unlimited bandwidth meters. We are going to use any “nix” operation system since the nix servers are more secured as compared to a windows server and it’s more realizable and fast. There could be many reasons of using nix servers as compared to windows servers. The configuration of a nix (Linux or UNIX) based server are almost same. I am sure many of you must have heard the name of FreeBSD ( www.freebsd.org ) which is a UNIX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix ) based operating system and is being used for most of the hosting servers around the globe because it is in the most secure form of UNIX. So we know what operating system we are going to install, FreeBSD is a free of cost Operating system so you don’t have to pay big charges like you have to for a windows based server. Many companies which are selling dedicated server machines offer to install nix based operating system on your server for free however there could be some setup costs which vary from provider to provider. After the operating system has been installed on your machine you first of all need an http server. There are few http servers available on the internet and Apache ( http://apache.org/ ) is the most popular http ( http://httpd.apache.org/ ) server around and moreover it’s free of cost. Remember we are going to use all the free of cost and most secured (as updated) software’s to be installed on our server machine. Apache is there made a part of a nix based operating system and most of the nix based OS already have apache server in them but you need to run it. In FreeBSD you can run apache by providing the following command “httpd”. However you need to setup a server name and basic configuration of apache server and the website you are going to run on it. You need to edit the httpd.conf file to run the http process. On my machine the httpd.conf file is located in “/usr/local/etc/apache22/” folder and I am using the latest version of apache that is 2.x.
( http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-apache.html )
You need to install name servers after that to make your website work; however you can check if apache is running on your machine by giving the IP of your server machine in the browser window. Setting up name servers is a core step of a web server because you are going to host websites. Most of the domain selling websites give you option to “Register Name server” chose that option and it will require a name for your name server and an IP address. Let’s say you are going to setup the name servers for genexbs.com, I’d chose ns1.genexbs.com and ns2.genexbs.com (at least two name servers are required) and I forwarded them to the main IP of my machine for example its 1.2.3.4 (just an imaginary IP address not possible in reality) considering 1.2.3.4 is my server machine’s IP which has already running apache on it.
It’s time to get back to our server configurations; we are going to move to the following folder “/etc/namedb” where my named.conf (name server configuration file) file is saved. A basic pattern is already defined in named.conf; you can read it and make changes to named.conf ( http://www.freebsddiary.org/zones.php ). After that named.conf is set to work, we need to move forward to some more steps. Till now our basic website will work. If we upload our website to our server at the specified path it will be appearing on the browser but a web server needs more stuff to be added such as databases and programming languages.

We are going use MySQL ( http://www.mysql.com ) database server on our server machine. Reason of using MySQL is that it’s the most popular database server almost 90% of the people on internet use MySQL database servers. In FreeBSD you can find MySQL database server in ports folder but if you are not familiar with FreeBSD that much it won’t be a problem as well just type “pkg_add –r mysql” and it will automatically install the latest MySQL server on your machine. You need to setup the sysadmin password. The easiest way to do is with the following command
mysqladmin -u root password newpassword
http://www.freebsddiary.org/mysql.php

After that MySQL server Is running you can create databases and work with them but for that you need a programming language. I would recommend PHP ( http://www.php.net/ ), again its free and open source.
You can find PHP again in the ports folder “/usr/ports/lang/” and install it by:
1. cd /usr/ports/lang/phpx (x is the version I recommend 5.x)
2. make config
3. make install
And you are done installing PHP the alternative way to install php is “pkg_add –r php5”
http://www.freebsdmadeeasy.com/tutorials/web-server/install-php-5-for-web-hosting.php
There could be many programming languages you can install depends on your interest and know how about the particular language. I will list a few which are used for web servers.
a. TCL ( www.tcl.tk )
b. Perl ( www.perl.org )
c. Ruby ( www.ruby-lang.org )
d. Python ( www.python.org )

So how we will upload the files on our server? Of course it will require an FTP server.
There are plenty of FTP servers on the web for example:
a. IglooFTP ( http://iglooftp.com )
b. py-curl ( http://pycurl.sourceforge.net/ )
c. cftp ( http://www.cftp.org )

There are so many of them the list goes on. Since we are on FreeBSD you can check them in “/usr/ports/ftp” Folder.
However while we are on FreeBSD we are going to run a process called inetd which will also allow us to connect to FTP server named “ftpd”. The configuration file for inetd is in “/etc/inetd.conf” we will just alter it to run our ftp server. We will add just a single line at the end of inetd.conf file, that is:
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/libexec/ftpd ftpd –l

After that you can add a user to the server by using the “adduser” ( http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/FreeBSD/adduser.8.html ) command and check if ftp works with the specified login/password.
That’s all you need to run your own web server as you go through you will be getting expert in all the fields and you can install different supporting tools such as control panels for maintaining your web servers.

Web based control panels are required to manage your web server. Web based control panels play a vital role in setting up a website. Web based control panels give you control over your web server, with easy to use graphical interface to setup and manage your websites easily. There are many web based control panels available to administrate your web server. Selection of a web based control panel depends on your website and web server requirements.

No matter you have shared hosting account or dedicated server, you need to have a web hosting control panel, in order to prepare and operate your web server & websites effectively.

Today we will overview a few of the most popular web server administration panels available.

CPANEL/WHM
CPANEL is one of the most popular control panels. We have been using CPANEL to manage our web servers from almost a decade. CPANEL is licensed software, available on most of the web hosting servers. It has the ability to handle multiple servers, resellers, and end users to handle their individual web. In other words it’s a complete system.

CPANEL is suitable for parties who need to handle multiple sites, resellers and end user accounts. Novice users may find it over crowded and complex in order to find out what all the options in CPANEL do. Also that it’s not free software and one has to pay the price for using it. However most hosting companies, offering shared hosting, provides CPANEL to handle the websites and its price is included in their monthly/yearly charges.

CPANEL is available for both NIX and Windows Server. For more information on CPANEL, you can visit http://www.cpanel.net

DirectAdmin is the 2nd best choice for us to manage a webserver. DirectAdmin Is an easy to use control panel and does almost everything that cPanel does but I find DirectAdmin working way faster than cPanel. cPanel sometimes slows down your machine which I’ve never seen has been ever an issue with DirectAdmin. Moreover what I like about DirectAdmin is its cool look which is attractive.

The pricing of cPanel and DirectAdmin is another factor to choose which web hosting manager you want for your webhosting company. You can get a cPanel license for 425$ / year directly from cPanel which makes it about 35$ a month. Other distributors of cPanel’s license take up to 45$ a month. While on the other side DirectAdmin gives out their monthly license for 29$ and their yearly license is for 200$ which makes it very affordable for all type of consumers (Administrators/Resellers/Users). The life time license for DirectAdmin is for 299$ while a life time license for cPanel is for 1499.99$ and that’s for only ONE server. See the huge difference? Since cPanel is in market for a long time and many of the existing BIG companies are using cPanel and most of them are used to it so cPanel is cashing out their time spent in market out of everyone while there is no reason to use such a costly Control panel for your websites while you can get one in a cheaper price.

If you are so much conscious about price, there’s another option if you don’t want to pay for a control panel, You can use “Webmin”. Webmin is largely based on Perl, running as its own process and web server. It defaults to TCP port 10000 for communicating, and can be configured to use SSL if OpenSSL is installed with additional required Perl Modules. It is a proper and a very strong server administration panel which gives you all the webhosting options too such as FTP server as well as mail servers, proxy servers, databases and many more. I’ve used it for many years as well and I still use Webmin where I don’t want to spend my money on any webhosting control panel.

DirectAdmin Website: http://www.directadmin.com/

There are many other competing software’s which I have never used such as:

• H-Sphere ( http://www.parallels.com/en/psoft )
• ISPConfig ( http://www.ispconfig.org )
• ISPmanager ( http://ispsystem.com/ )
• Plesk ( http://www.parallels.com/plesk/ )
• HSPcomplete ( http://www.parallels.com/products/hspcomplete/ )

If anyone have experience about these panel’s I would like to have a feedback.