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The growth of Google as a giant that dominates all aspects of the industry. The rise of YouTube into one of the Internet’s biggest sites in just a few short years. These are the factors that define the current Internet.

The industry has evolved by leaps and bounds in recent years. And a lot of that growth is based on a very different notion of website content than just a few years ago.

Today’s demand for dynamic web content such as video and audio streaming has changed the face of web hosting, and specifically how web servers are utilized. This dynamic content, in the form of sites like YouTube, has played a huge role in the general growth of the World Wide Web.

Most consumer websites and news sites now prominently feature video streaming. MySpace has made audio streaming a standard requirement for any social media site. All of this growth in dynamic content represents a huge increase in activity and storage on the Web servers that deliver website content. More server-side resources, and especially CGI usage, drives up a site’s bandwidth usage, making it harder for many online businesses to accommodate growing traffic on standard shared hosting plans.

So, many businesses are choosing to start off with dedicated hosting today, and the industry, like web content itself, is quickly evolving to accommodate this heightened demand. That’s why many companies now offer advanced servers such as multi-processors, to better handle larger requests on resources and bandwidth. It’s also why, if you’re planning out a website that takes advantage of new demand for media, you may want to consider upgrading your dedicated server in the early stages.

Simply put, dedicated hosting is better for media-oriented sites because you get a guaranteed allotment of resources/concurrent connections/RAM. You also have more control when it comes to scaling your solution as you grow your userbase.

So, if your Internet business strategy incorporates more video- and media-intensive content in the near future — and it probably should — then that’s another reason why dedicated hosting may be a better choice for your online business than shared hosting.

Next: Now that you’ve decided to go with a dedicated server, how do you figure out which provider will best suit your hosting needs?