Imagine you share a home with a couple of roommates. You each pay a portion of the rent, utilities, ...and other expenses to keep the household running smoothly. But you also have to make compromises from time to time. For example, if one roommate is using the kitchen sink, you have to wait to do your dishes. It's not impossible for you to complete your task, but there is a wait.

That's shared hosting.

Dedicated hosting is getting your own place and being able to use anything in the house whenever you want without delays, the kind of delays that—in the Web world—can potentially cost you customers.

When you select this kind of hosting, you get, as the name suggests, a dedicated server all to yourself. No other website lives on that server but yours. All the server's storage space and speed are there for the benefit of your site alone. No one to compete with for page load speed. No one to compete with for uptime. And you get to choose your operating system.

If a shared server crashes, several sites may go down—including yours. With dedicated hosting, the likelihood of your site going down is reduced because dedicated servers are often connected to redundant power sources, meaning if one fails, the others are there for backup, keeping your site up and running through any kind of failure of one power source.

Another benefit to having your hosting on a dedicated server is that you can host more than one site on it. The server will still be dedicated to you and your sites alone, but you also have the option of adjusting bandwidth allocation. Say you have an immensely popular site that sees a lot of traffic, and another site that's not quite as popular yet. You can dedicate a little more bandwidth to the high-traffic site, ensuring it's able to handle the high volume of visitors without reduction of speed or going down completely.

Dedicated server hosting also offers a higher level of security for your site. This may be especially important to you if you run an e-commerce site where customers can enter their credit card information. If you want to offer your customers better protection of their personal information, dedicated server hosting is the way to go.