Shared Web Hosting
- The next concern for you after designing and developing web pages is
to get your web site hosted on the Internet. But with so many web
hosting companies offering various types of web hosting packages -
shared web hosting, dedicated web hosting, managed web hosting, which
type of hosting should you choose?
Shared Web Hosting - As a
general rule, it is a good idea to go for shared web hosting if you are a
small business owner and cost is your major concern. But before you
make your hosting decision, let us first understand what is shared web
hosting service and what are the advantages and disadvantages of shared
web hosting. What is shared web hosting? Shared web hosting service is a
convenient and economic way of hosting web sites if you do not require
extremely high performance and high bandwidth. As its name suggests, in
shared web hosting service, the web server that hosting the web pages
are shared by many other websites. The number of websites on a shared
hosting server can go up to thousands at times. Due to one large and
high performance web server is shared by hosting many different websites
on it, web hosting companies providing shared web hosting service could
offer them at an economic rates. Even with so many websites hosted on a
web server, you can be rest assured that the web hosting providers will
not compromise on any kind of security and performance issues on the
shared hosting servers. Moreover, shared hosting web servers are
operated, monitored and maintained around the clock by IT professionals
to ensure minimum server downtimes. Technically speaking, shared hosting
servers are run on Unix or other multi-user operating system and each
website hosted on the web server is given a separate account in the
operating system. Typically, websites hosted on shared servers are given
a shared IP addresses and allocated a fix amount of web resources.
Let's examine the advantages and disadvantages of shared web hosting
before you consider shared web hosting service: Advantages of Shared Web
Hosting Service Economical: As many websites are hosted on a single web
server, web hosting providers are able to offer low cost shared web
hosting services. In general, you can expect to pay $5-10 per month for
shared web hosting services. Today, due to stiff competition in the web
hosting industry, you can even discover many web hosting companies
offering huge web space and bandwidth (as high as 1000 MB disk space and
40 GB bandwidth). Convenience: Shared hosting web servers are managed
and maintained by professionals who are highly skilled with specialized
knowledge of the field. As a result, you can concentrate on your web
business and let these professionals worry about the maintenance and
uptimes of the web server. Customization: Even though web resources are
shared, web masters can manage their website using control panel or
similar tools provided by the web hosting company. They are free to
upload files, remove web pages, add database, check web statistic and
etc. Also they are allowed to create domain name specific e-mails
accounts. Efficiency: Today, shared web hosting service comes with web
space and bandwidth that are more than sufficient for small business
websites. However, you can always add more resources should you overrun
the web space or bandwidth usage. Disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting
Service Slower Responses: Given that a physical web server is shared,
websites in the shared web hosting have to accept slower server response
time if compare to dedicate server hosting. Reliability Issues: In most
cases, web hosting providers may take care of the security and
performance of the shared server. However, it may happen that some of
websites hosted on the shared server run a malicious program or script
or over-utilize the resources, can bring down the web server. Your
website would have to suffer downtimes and inaccessibility as a result.
Sharing Issues: Moreover, you just need one "bad" website in your shared
web server to get your website banned altogether by ISP or search
engine due to shared IP address (Note: you can always pay extra to get a
dedicated IP address to avoid this problem). Security Issues: Shared
web hosting is more risky and opens up potential security issues as
other web masters having an account on the same web server could hacked
to your sensitive data. Before you decide to ink a deal on shared web
hosting, be sure to consider all the pros and cons of shared web hosting
services above. After all, selecting a right web hosting services may
be one of the most critical business decisions for your online business.