Shared Hosting 101
Web hosting is a service offered by companies that are ready to give away their high power servers connected to the Internet at all times to businesses that want to host their websites on them, for rent.
A web hosting service provider basically offers a certain amount of server resources like bandwidth, web space, etc to help you store all your web content and web logs, and serve it up on the world wide web via the Internet in the most efficient manner possible.
There are a plethora of web hosting service providers who offer their server resources in different hosting plans, the main types being: Reseller, Shared, Dedicated, VPS and Cloud. But apart from knowing your needs to be able to choose a web host, there is another factor that plays into nudging you to choose a certain plan - affordability. Affordable web hosting plans allure the most number of customers and it doesn’t come across as a surprise.
Shared web hosting is by far the most affordable web hosting plan available today apart from Cloud hosting plans that are still a little steeper than shared hosting plans.
In Shared hosting plan, a web host does allot you server resources according to your website’s needs but also caters to the needs of the other websites. So, basically you are hosted along with a bunch of other websites on a common server that divides its resources depending on the plans you sign up for and your website’s needs to make sure it runs efficiently.
This hosting plan comes at an affordable price because the cost of the server and the Internet are shared by all the businesses that host their website on that one server. The maintenance of the server, software updates etc are all manages by the web host rendering you worry free from all those tasks.
Even though the affordability seems to play in extremely well for this hosting plan, the flexibility it offers isn’t as good. A business that hosts its website on a shared server has to make do with the server hardware, server version, OS, software etc the host decides to use on its server. The hosting plan though does come with attractive control panels to offer to give the user some authority over his website to bring about minor tweaks without having to reach out for technical support.
But if you think that this hosting plan is suited for all sizes of business websites, then you stand wrong. This hosting plan only suits those business websites that draw in a fair amount of traffic periodically and do not take up too many resources to run efficiently; which means it is a wise choice if you are a small or medium sized business offering their products and services online.
If you have a business website that draws in a lot of traffic regularly and has a lot may functionalities to offer, then this hosting plan isn’t meant for you. If you still decide to opt for this hosting plan, be sure that you will be exceeding the amount of resources allotted to you. This will not only increase your hosting budget, but may also affect the efficiency of the server leading to the risk of your website’s technical breakdown and bounce offs from it.
So be sure of what your website needs to run efficiently and choose wisely, not according to the price tags.
