My official decision… No beard. I thought it would be great to have a new look before I turn 22, but “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Plus, when I shaved everything off today, it was like a carpet in my sink.

Behold the glory of a dedicated server. I’ve gotten a few emails over the past months from random visitors about starting a website out of their garage or room. It doesn’t cost that much, but the idea of hosting from your home is not for everyone. Here’s a little tutorial for everyone thinking of starting your own website.

Planning ahead. What is your site for? Personal? Business/Professional? Multi-User? Which ever route you choose, here are some tips to help you make a decision.

Personal Use

It’s safe to assume that my own website is for personal use. Shared hosting is probably the most economical choice. Sure, a dedicated server is great, but for a personal site, it’s overkill. Shared hosting is what is offered by most hosting companies and could range from $6.00 to $20.00 per month. Since I’m pretty stingy with my money, I would go for the $6.00 per month plans. Be careful with shared hosting. It may seem like you are better off than the dedicated server, but if you intend to grow your site, shared hosting is only good for the short term. How this works is that there is this data warehouse that holds everyone’s account information. When someone logs onto your site, they are viewing content from that data warehouse. This implies that this large hard drive and bandwidth is always working to its full capacity. This full capacity is not just for your site. It’s accommodating the other domains as well. This sentence may sound a little late, but to make a long story short, laggy site. For personal sites, you won’t even notice the lag.

Business/Professional and Multi-User

Business/Professional use falls on the border line of shared hosting and a dedicated server. If your business site is only meant for showing your potential customers what services you have to offer, then shared hosting is doable. However, if you intend of offer online services such as live chat or entertainment, then dedicated server is the way to go. Here is what you get with a dedicated server. You get a dedicated server. What this means is that you get a monster of a computer to host your website. How does this help you? All of the resources are for your site only. Your bandwidth, hard drive, memory, etc., is only for your website. There is no accommodating for the domain next to you. Your website and database are in the same location. With shared hosting, most likely, your website is in one place, while your database is somewhere else. When a shared hosting company does this, it puts less stress on their resources, but you are left with a site that is a little laggy.

If you are building a multi-user website such as a facebook, eharmony, or ebay, the only decision to make is a dedicated server. Dedicated servers are not cheap, but it is the best decision to make in this situation. The initial setup of a dedicated server is more difficult than a shared host because you are really setting up a computer. With shared hosting, the computer is already set for you. Although resources are limited in the beginning, your provider can expand your server as you need.

Dennis, what do you do to host your websites?

Even though my websites are for personal use, I decided to go with a dedicated server. When I say dedicated, I really mean dedicated. Usually, when you get a dedicated server, your service provider is the one that actually holds the server. My dedicated server is right next to my bed. If anything goes wrong, the repairs are instant. Sounds cool, but it’s not the way to go for the average user. The main reason why I made the decision to host my websites from my own room is because of my hobby (Yes, obviously I need to find a new hobby, a woman, or prostitute).

If my website was on a shared hosting site, it may end up being slow because of Mai Tube and my live chat option. By the end of the year, I will have so much content that I would need a dedicated server anyway. I’m also hosting my website with limited resources. I’ve received questions about the speed of my server and size of the hard drive or drives. These people are shocked at the answer I give them. When you buy a dedicated server, the computer usually is a monster with about 2.5GHz dual core processor with 250Gb of hard drive space and 2Gb of memory. I wish I had that for my server. My home server is a 1.8GHz single core celeron processor with a 40Gb hard drive and 1Gb of memory. Pay close attention to “celeron.” A celeron processor is mainly used for everyday office duties. In the world of techies, my server is a joke. However, because my computer is dedicated to my website, which is why my website is fast.