For me it all depends on what I need for a specific project or for a longer term plan. I don't like to keep all my eggs in one basket, so more than one hosting account and more than one style of account.
Large, resource intensive sites where I know I want more control and reliability, I'll look towards dedicated. For smaller sites/project where I'm just putting something up to see how it goes, I'll put off to a shared account.
Also depends on what you mean with shared. There are plenty of "shared" accounts that you have no flippn clue how many hundreds of accounts and sites are on the same box - could be thousands. Low price, but potential for big risk.
You can get a good virtual account with a minimum number of other accounts on the box and do really well if your resource needs are not huge. Good pricing and minimized the risk.
On the flip side, I had an interesting conversation with a hosting buddy recently who told me that there are PLENTY of companies out there selling "dedicated" servers that are actually "virtual" boxes all running on massive servers. They still consider them "dedicated" simply because they can partition the server down to the level of allocating resources at each level. I don't call that dedicated, BUT a chunk of the hosting industry does. AND the same person had a talk with DELL, who apparently is a leader in selling servers for this purpose and supports the concept of this type of thing being a "dedicated" server.
So... what's "dedicated" and what's "shared" and what's a "virtual" plan in the end? Will you really know without being able to inspect the data center you are in?
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