While the internet performance licensing fight rages on, I've written about it last week and the week before, so it's time for a good old website break.

I was in a conference call with a potential web design client when the topic of web hosting came up. This is one of the most fundamental pieces of a website, but it is rarely discussed or thought about since, like referees, it is only noticed when it messes up. (Webmasters are often treated the same way.)

In discussing their web hosting situation, I realized that they didn't really understand the pros and cons of ASP.NET vs. PHP, IIS vs. Apache, and Windows Server vs. Linux. This conversation didn't even begin to delve into the differences between databases like MySQL and MS SQL Server.

Wait! Before your eyes glaze over, I'm not going to break out the technical differences, since for the vast majority of websites every one of those tools is capable of doing the job and their relative costs are similar (except for SQL Server. That's really expensive - like thousands of dollars.)

Now lets take a look at our choices:

Dedicated vs. Shared hosting

When you view a website, you type in a URL which contains a domain name, like AllAccess.com . Your computer checks to see where that domain is located on the internet and then asks that computer for the text images and other information that make up the site.

The computer where those files are stores is called a server. Sometimes this server is dedicated to only serving up files for one website. This is called a "dedicated" server. If the server handles the file requests for many websites, it would be called "shared hosting".

When deciding whether shared or dedicated hosting is for your website, the main piece of information in the decision making process is how many resources your site requires. If your site requires a ton of bandwidth (you're serving a lot of audio and video directly from your server, not from a company that handles streaming) or it requires a bunch of processing power (if you don't know how much processing power your site requires, a shared hosting environment will be sufficient) - you may need a dedicated host. Dedicated servers are more expensive, but since they are "dedicated" only to your site, they can handle a lot of hits. For this decision, I would defer to your web designer or webmaster - and if you don't have one - get a shared hosting account.