Before moving ahead to the differences between dedicated and shared servers, let’s understand the meaning of both the terms on individual basis.
“A dedicated server can be referred as rental and exclusive use of a computer that includes various components like web server, concerned software and connection to the internet that are together housed in the premises of a web hosting company. It is primarily needed for a website that may generate an ample amount of traffic.”
“A shared server refers to the services provided for multiple web sites, each of which will have its own internet domain name from a single web server. It is an inexpensive way to create a web presence.”
Now, what’s the difference between both the terms?
You can clearly understand it with the example of Oracle. When a user tends to Oracle connection, a process is created on the server. For Linux/Unix servers, this process is referred as "Oracle SID" where SID implies the oracle identifier. This entire process is dedicated to that single user session. When another user connects to the Oracle, another process is dedicated to the session of that user. These dedicated servers procedures act as a mediator from the application to the Oracle instance and goes on and on.
Each of these dedicated server processes consumes memory of the database server. As the count of concurrent connections tends to increase, the amount of memory that is required by all the processes of dedicated server also increases. The database server may not have ample amount of physical memory for all of the server processes that can provide support to all the active application users. In addition to this, many of the dedicated server processes may sit idle. They are generally waiting for the end user that can submit another request to the database. After all, humans are not as fast as computer systems. It takes time for the user so that he can read the information, which is presented in the application and submit another request for the database. So, the processes of dedicated server can use up enough amount of memory for a number of users who stay idle at a particular time period. At another instance of time, the user may have something to do while other users are sitting idle.
On the other hand, in a shared server family (primarily referred as Multi-Threaded Server or MTS), users have liberty to share the server connections. You will find one-to-many relationship between server procedures and end-users instead of one-to-one ratio. A single shared server process is utilized by numerous application servers in the connection. Shared server is used due to its scalability that provides the means to connect a huge number of users at same time.
After reading this article, you can easily have an idea about both the hosting services so that you can opt for the one suitable for your business.
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