One of the most common questions in your mind when you decide to go online with you small business or open an online store or start creating few blogs / websites. Do you need a dedicated server? The answer lies within yourself.

First you need to look at few things:

Are you planning to have just one website?

Will you plan to add more sites within the next one year?

Are you selling online or will you at some point within this year plan to sell online?

Are or selling physical goods or downloadable e-goods and ads?

Are you technology savvy?

Do you know programming (html, css, basic hosting concepts etc)

Is it critical to have 100% uptime for your websites?

Will you be using lot of bandwidth?

If you have answered yes to any or all of the above questions, then you need to lay out a strategy before proceeding with hosting solution. Most of us make the mistake of trying to get just a simple hosting plan and try it out and then maybe if we need, move to a dedicated server. You are only wasting time and money. If you within few months add another website, you need to get another hosting account. Most web hosting companies charge for the full year upfront and there are cancellation charges.

Also the initial fear that you will have on the making the step of having your own server and maintaining it, can be huge. This is the biggest hurdle that you will have to overcome before going on with a dedicated hosting package. Once you are over this, then you may actually save money in the long run and at the same time you can keep your sites safe and separated from others.

If your website is on your own dedicated server, it has less chances of ever being down (Provided you are with a good webhosting company with reliable network infrastructure), as compared to sharing your site on the same server with 100's of other websites. These days you can get a dedicated server with plenty of bandwidth for well under 200 dollars. Also Linux servers are very reliable and you can get them with control panel like PLESK or HELM, which gives you the familiar windows like user interface.

If you have answered YES to all of the above questions in the first paragraph, then you are probably better off with you own dedicated server or dedicated hosting plan.

On the other hand, if you are just entering the online world, has only one website or blog, simply stay with a shared hosting plan. Also, if you have another full-time job, just trying this out as a hobby, stay with a shared hosting plan from a reliable web host. Our recent rankings have FogHost and Yahoo at the top for this month's shared hosting providers.