Choosing between a dedicated servers and shared hosting brings up a lot of questions. Does your site need a dedicated server or is shared web hosting good enough? How can I tell? Should I save money or get a powerful server now? How much control will I have with each option? Today I will be answering these questions and hopefully helping to make the choice easy.

When Is The Decision Is Easy?
The decision is easy when you don’t have a choice… If your site is getting tons of visitors, if your current shared host says it is using too many resources, if you are running a lot of dynamic php mysql sites that demand a lot of memory and cpu, or if you can’t afford downtime because you are doing marketing on your sites that can’t be down. Any of these reasons make the decision to go with a dedicated server easy and the real question then becomes what type of dedicated server.

By The Numbers…
You should fit into one of these hypothetical situations… Just keep in mind these are very ruff and you should give your hosting company stats so they can decide.

1. I run WordPress or PHP/MySQL site and get over 500 unique visitors a day. Get a dedicated server. Under that number of visitors and you are probably fine on shared web hosting.

2. I run a static site and get under 500 visitors a day. Shared hosting is fine. Go dedicated or VPS if it grows a lot. Static is a lot easier on the server.

A lot of shared hosts will be fine with bigger sites but its borderline in most cases. I also tend to error on the side of caution. I’ve seen plenty of intensive forums with 3,000 visitors a day running on shared hosting for months and then one day something flukes to cause a spike and suddenly they have 10 days to upgrade.

By The Money
Shared hosting is around $10 a month while a dedicated server is at least $70. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to make this choice. If money is a factor go with shared hosting.

I Want Control
If you want complete control of your hosting environment go with a dedicated server. Shared hosting will limit what you can do, what you can tweak, and what you can install. With a dedicated server you can do anything you want!

I work for UK2 and over the last ten years have helped a lot of people choose between the dedicated servers we offer versus our shared web hosting. It really just boils down to the above issues.

Yahoo reports that Online retailer Amazon.com’s Web site went down for more than two hours in the middle of the day Friday.

Around 10 a.m. PDT, the Web site shut down, giving an error code to anyone visiting it, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a California-based company that measures Internet activity.

One digg.com user asks:

Amazon’s down!!! What’s going on? Asks one Digg.com user.

Error message is: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable. Major update? Technical difficulties? What’s the deal?

Maybe they didn’t pay their 6.95 for shared cPanel hosting?

So you built a Web site? All done? Amrit Ray posts his thoughts on how to promote a Web site.

How do I effectively promote my website, is a million dollar question. And yes, it is no exaggeration. People all over the world are making millions by effectively promoting their websites and reaching out to thousands of potential businesses that they otherwise had never thought possible.

The advent of technology and its easy accessibility has changed the way people buy or do business online. All this has ushered in a new era of e-commerce where people’s perception towards online businesses has changed dramatically and they are ready to accept the concept of online businesses and feel comfortable buying from someone they have never met or probably will never meet in person.

Now this has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for businesses worldwide. Everybody is vying for a share of the million dollar online market. The first step of course involves getting an attractive website done highlighting the products you want to sell. A good professional web designer would be able to help you out here both with web hosting and design. The next step involves promoting your website so that it reaches its target audience.

There is no sure shot way or magic pill that one can use to promote their website. And in fact, no one knows for sure what works and what does not. All major search engines have different criteria or algorithm to judge how relevant a website is to its audience. No one knows the exact factors that make one website feature over the other on certain keywords. However some factors that could increase your search engine visibility are back links and good content.

Back links are links from other websites leading back to your own website. The quality of the website linking back to your site is also very important. Back links from negative websites could harm your websites image, so be careful about that. Now the question is how do you get back links? The simple answer is, ask them for it. Though, link exchange in my opinion is not a very good idea. Search engines will know that you have mutually exchanged the links and the link backs are artificial. Submit your website to Directories. There are thousands of them out there. It takes time and patience. Leave comments on blogs with a link to your website. This is one point that should never be over done. There is a fine line between promoting and spamming and crossing the line could be disastrous. No one likes spammers and neither do search engines. Too many back links in a short period of time can also arouse suspicion, so continue at a steady pace until you see your ranking improve. Another good way of getting back links is posting in forums as most of them allow you to use your website address in your signature.

Now when people start to find your website online it is important that your website has relevant and interesting content so that your visitors stay online longer. The longer they stay the more chances they will buy.

These are a few small steps one can take to promote ones website effectively.