Shared hosting or dedicated server that is the question

In a saturated industry like web hosting, the server and platform offering from providers all start to look alike with barely much difference between various hosting packages being offered by different companies.
Take the hosting package below for example, same package (or one extremely similar to it) was being offered by more than 10 different web hosting company, with the package branded under different names.

Web Hosting Package here
100MB premium web hosting space
Full 24X7 FTP access
510,000MB Data transfer per month
Password protected directories
CGI/Perl, Mod Perl, PHP, SSI
FrontPage
Webalizer graphical web stats
Raw logs
File manager
100 POP3 email accounts
Auto-responder
Spam filter
Private Webmail
Control panel
Online backup tool
Technical support

Hosting companies are offering would be hosting services buyers more and more web space and more and more bandwidth, this is all very good but what really separate the leaders in the hosting business from the beginners who still need a lot of growing up to do is the quality of services that comes as part of the hosting package. Many hosting companies offers cheap hosting, that is all well and good, the question to ask is not just how cheap is cheap but how reliable are the services behind the cheap offering including the quest whether your hosting company can say yes to the following: high quality, reliability, performance, flexibility, Scalability, free domain name, money back guarantee?

For the more demanding website owners who has outgrown the share hosting stage and has got to a point when only a cheap dedicated serve will do. What are the questions you should ask a dedicated server provider before you sign on the dotted line? Just any one can now provide a server hooked up to the Internet, but if you are hosting a very important site, what should you expect from your dedicated server provider? In addition to high end server with disk space, processor speed and bandwidth to come with the site or applications you need to run on your dedicated server, how about disaster recovery? Has provision been made should the disk on your server crash? Should a fuse burn in the rack that host your server, how quickly can it be replaced to stop your server going offline, is remote reboot facility available or do you have to have physical access to the server to reboot it?

Of all the questions asked about dedicated server the most important things when considering a cheap dedicate server is the security of your server. Whatever operation system your dedicated server users (most popular being Linux and Windows) regular patches will need to be applied to keep the server operating system up to date, who will apply the patches as they become due, you or your server provider? Most of the time it is better to get the server provider to be responsible for applying software updates as this will be much more efficient than you applying it yourself. Dedicated server provider tends to package this services as and add-on to providing you dedicate server so you should be aware of this before choosing a dedicated server, the terminology used for this service is managed dedicated server.

Once you have asked all the above vital questions and get a satisfactory answer, they you are ready to choose your shared hosting package or a dedicated serve.