At some point in the web hosting selection process, prospective web site owners will be confronted with the question of whether to go with shared web hosting or invest in the more expensive dedicated hosting. In general, you'll only need dedicated web hosting if you are running an extremely large e-commerce web site.

If you are just starting out, or growing your small business, you can certainly stick with shared web hosting until you reach the point that your business requires the kind of performance that can only be provided by a dedicated web server.

Let's say you are just starting out. You've chosen your domain name, registered it and selected a web host.

What's next? Your web host has to give you certain information needed to get your website up and running.

This information includes passwords to get into your account, paths to the server directories where your files should be uploaded and, most importantly, what your domain name servers are called.

Connecting The Dots

Domain name servers (DNS) provide the link between your domain name (mysite.com) and its Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP address is a series of numbers like this: 123.456.78.9. and every web server has its own IP address.

For a dedicated server hosting a single domain, the IP address is equivalent to the domain name. A site hosted on a dedicated server can be found on the Web as either 123.456.78.9 or as mysite.com.

Shared Servers

Conversely, a server providing shared web hosting contains multiple websites on the same computer but they all have the same IP address.

If you were to type in an IP address associated with a shared server, you'd get an error message or possibly would be redirected to the hosting company's main web site.

So domain names are mandatory for websites hosted on shared servers as they are the only way to access those web sites - they cannot be accessed by an IP address alone as they can be with dedicated web hosting.