People sometimes do not realise how important it is to make the right choice when deciding on which hosting company to use and what type of server you want. You may find it a little confusing all the choices you have when it comes to the different services offered and often you may have to base your choice a lot on the cost of it. Dedicated servers are usually the most reliable, allow you to have the most control and also the best for search engine optimisation, but these servers often come at a price of upwards of £100 per month, which for a small to medium sized business is a lot.
Shared servers can be good for most small to medium businesses but they do have their down sides. As this server is shared with potentially hundreds of other websites you may not have any control on how it is set up. You will also find that if one of the other sites on the server is causing issues such as having a high load of traffic, this may mean your website and emails also go offline.
Shared servers can sometimes have a negative impact on your search engine rankings especially if the IP address of the server becomes blacklisted.