I have been developing for a few years now and for most of my clients I have used shared hosting. Most of my clients are small to medium sized companies that require both web hosting and email hosting (most hook this up to their mail server).

Lately I am wondering if shared hosting is satisfactory for such companies, is shared hosting secure enough for such? Should I be looking at providing clients with hosting on a dedicated server? When companies depend so much on their email, is shared hosting satisfactory for such reliance? No one has ever complained to me but looking at this with a nervous cap on! Or is shared hosting sufficient.

I dont develop that much so I would find it difficult to justify purchasing a dedicated server or even a virtual server, especially as I dont want the responsibility to maintain them.

For "light" to "medium" use ie. no ecommerce, shared hosting should be fine for most people.

When you start getting into ecommerce you really should look at vps or dedicated.

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As long as it's not ecommerce, shared hosting should be good enough.

In my opinion, the only difference, in terms of privacy and security between dedicated and shared is that shared can viewed by the people who work for the hosting company a little easier... which doesn't piss me off really to be honest. anyway, i would botch dedicated hosting if it was left to me. I'd rather leave it to the people who know.

Of course, if you had a good amount of clients, then dedicated or even VPS would be a much cheaper option... also bare in mind, support, etc.

Em... err.... no

If you're worried about security then you need to worry a lot more about potential issues from other users on the same servers.

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Yes, as you can see - I'm surprised I even know what a server is...

care to enlighten me as to what the issues surrounding shared hosting in comparisons with VPS/dedicated are?

With VPS / Dedicated you have a lot more control over the environment.

On a shared server you have to deal with whatever the provider has provided in the manner in which it has been provided.

From a security perspective that means that it would be quite typical to find a lot more ports open to the outside world eg. MySQL, POP, IMAP, SMTP etc. etc.

You also have no way of knowing what other users are up to, so if another user on the same server were to be slashdotted or hit the frontpage of Digg you / your clients could suffer the consequences.

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But which also would mean that it would have to be well set up. Wouldn't a half arsed set-up of a dedicated server be less secure than any shared set-up?

Yes, actually. Good point. if you wanted to dabble in other technologies, you would be more restricted.

Actually, that happened me a few times. A very famous lecturer in a uni in the USA died, and his website was fairly video heavy. Hosted on the same server as our own one. Google put an RIP link onto their front page, and before I knew it, I was getting an apology from Bluehost for the servers been so slow.

That pretty much answers all my questions, thanks mr. blacknight! Very helpful info.

That would depend on who you get it from.

Some providers when you order a dedicated server will simply do a base install and hand it over. Others will configure it to your specification / requirement

Yes. On shared hosting you're normally going to be dealing with "stable" technologies with quite restricted configurations as you're dealing with the lowest common denominator and want stability over anything else
Glad to have been of some help

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And actually to add to the bill - what advantage does plesk have?
is it like a control panel, or what purpose does it specifically serve?

Sorry i've hijacked the thread

Plesk is a control panel

It basically controls all aspects of a server for you, so that you don't need to get "down and dirty" with the server unless you really want to

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