If you expect to be building a very large site, or feel that you will have an extreme amount of traffic, then a dedicated server is probably what you need. Dedicated servers are, as their name indicates, exclusively devoted to serving your site's content, without interruption. A customer of a shared hosting plan might suffer if placed on a server with an extremely popular site, or with an extremely high number of fellow customers, but those with dedicated servers do not have this problem.
Typical Dedicated Server Statistics
Today's dedicated server market starts at about US 40-50$ per month, which will get you a 1-1.5 GHz Celeron-based server, with 512 MB of RAM, about 60 GB of disk space, and 1-5 TB of monthly data transfer. Higher capacity servers will cost 75$-400$ per month, and may use Dual Xeon processors, 1-2TB RAID array of fast SCSI hard drives, and much greater bandwidth allotments. These prices are for "unmanaged dedicated servers", which means that you are leased the server, but you must pay extra for assistance from your hosting company.
Managed servers cost more, but include a prepaid amount of technical assistance from the vendor. Generally they will keep the server patched and functioning and will detect and repair hardware and software failures without additional charges. Any server can be a managed server (after all, the value added is independent of the machine), but it really doesn't make sense to have a low-end managed server. Most low-end servers are leased to bargain hunters, and most of them don't want to pay more money for server management.
Typical Dedicated Server Statistics
Today's dedicated server market starts at about US 40-50$ per month, which will get you a 1-1.5 GHz Celeron-based server, with 512 MB of RAM, about 60 GB of disk space, and 1-5 TB of monthly data transfer. Higher capacity servers will cost 75$-400$ per month, and may use Dual Xeon processors, 1-2TB RAID array of fast SCSI hard drives, and much greater bandwidth allotments. These prices are for "unmanaged dedicated servers", which means that you are leased the server, but you must pay extra for assistance from your hosting company.
Managed servers cost more, but include a prepaid amount of technical assistance from the vendor. Generally they will keep the server patched and functioning and will detect and repair hardware and software failures without additional charges. Any server can be a managed server (after all, the value added is independent of the machine), but it really doesn't make sense to have a low-end managed server. Most low-end servers are leased to bargain hunters, and most of them don't want to pay more money for server management.