Tips for Choosing a Shared Web Hosting Plan
Shared web hosting is often the best option to choose when you’re ready to put your website online. However, the number and variety of web hosting options can be overwhelming. Let’s try to cut through some of the confusion and see why shared hosting is usually your best choice.
Shared hosting, sometimes referred to as “virtual hosting”, is where most people start out. In this arrangement, the same server or computer is shared by many different web sites. All of the sites have their own individual slice of data storage capability, and they are securely separated from other sites on the same drive.
Shared hosting will provide sufficient disk space and resources for most individual, hobby, or small business sites that don’t have a lot of traffic or tons of multimedia running on their site. A certain amount of system resources are allocated for all the sites on the server, and they share these resources.
If any particular website on a shared hosting system suddenly gets a big rush of traffic, it can create some bottlenecks and potentially compromise the performance of other sites on that same server. This is unusual but can happen in certain circumstances.
As an example, let’s assume someone has a site selling a product, and they put a video on the home page that automatically starts playing when someone visits the page. Then, they buy advertising on highly active traffic exchanges, which results in other people hitting their page very frequently. Each time someone hits the page, it starts loading the video. This is unusual activity that can drag the performance of that server down and affect other sites on the same server. Good hosting companies have people online 24 hours a day watching for things like this, and making adjustments accordingly.
Great news – shared web hosting isn’t expensive any more. It is very affordable for almost anyone. You can get reliable hosting for 5-10 dollars a month, which was unheard of a few years ago. Prices have dropped considerably. Go for a month to month plan at first, to see if your host’s support and performance is acceptable. If it is, you can sign on for longer periods at discounted rates – an even better deal.
Many hosts offer site creation tools. These tools make it easy to design and publish a respectable web site from scratch. One thing to be careful of – find out if the site creation tool is proprietary to the host. In some cases, these tools are tied in with the actual site in such a way that moving to another host would be difficult. Others are standalone and the site you create is like any other, and easy to move if desired.
For most people hosting personal or small business sites, shared web hosting is the most practical solution. You get everything you need in abundance, and you always have the option to upgrade your plan to a dedicated server should your site expand and require a higher level of service.
Are you trying to find the best hosting plan for your website? Get the scoop about the inexpensive plan that performs well for most people – shared web hosting. Click here to get your own unique version of this article with free reprint rights.