Shared Web Hosting
Introduction
When buying into a web site hosting service package the server that your website, or web pages, are resident on can be a dedicated or a shared web hosting server. The server itself is a powerful computer such as you could use for any computer network serving purposes, having a dedicated one means that only your web pages, and website(s), are on that server; whereas on a shared web hosting plan the server will have other websites on it - as well as yours.
Implications of shared web hosting
There are two significant implications behind using shared web hosting; which are that some shared web hosting services might restrict the disk-space that your website can occupy and the broadband width available to users trying to access your website could also be restricted. The result of this is that if a website is intended to show large media/video files then the website owner could soon find themselves running out of storage space and that the files are very slow to download/view over the internet. Also, even if the website did not contain a lot of large multi-media files, if the website were to attract a lot of visitors they would experience slow delivery of the web pages - which the users may well perceive as a your website being a poor one resulting in them not returning to it.
Should I buy a shared web hosting plan?
Shared web hosting plans can be excellent value for money and will certainly be cheaper than buying dedicated web hosting. However, before deciding whether to buy a dedicated or shared web hosting plan you really do need to think about the following points. If your website is essentially for personal uses, will not contain hundreds of web pages and will not be used to distribute a lot of video files - then a shared web hosting is almost certainly the best option for you. If your website is to serve a business activity again there is no reason at all why you couldn’t use shared web hosting services, providing it is not going to be running a lot of video files and will not be too big a website. A proviso here of course is that shared web hosting will mean that, as far as the user experience of your website is concerned, it won’t cope well with lots of people accessing it all at once. For a small or niche market business this might not be a problem to begin with, whilst you are building up your business - but what about the future? Both for personal and business web sites you always need to plan ahead as you never know just how well or quickly the demand for your website(s) content might increase. Therefore, ideally you should find a web site hosting service that can quickly adapt to your needs, offering you expanded facilities or an easy switch to a dedicated web server. Returning to the idea of using a shared web hosting service for a business website - in most instances shared web hosting will prevent you from running a secure website, HTTPS, meaning that holding sensitive data or conducting financial transactions would not be recommended.
Choosing a shared web hosting plan.
A quick search on the internet will reveal more shared web hosting plans than you could hope to read through without becoming thoroughly confused, so what help can we offer when it comes to choosing a shared web hosting plan? Regardless of what the shared web hosting company’s own website might say - if there customer support is poor then think carefully before signing up with them. The simplest way to find out about their customer support is to look for testimonials about the shared web host and their level of customer support. Needless to say the monthly cost will be an important factor - but do remember that the cheapest doesn’t necessarily equal the best! Even though you’re sharing a web server you should still expect around 1GB of disk-space to yourself these days, possibly more than 2GB even. Ask if there is a monthly limit on data transfers, especially if you are dealing with video files. Finally, find out what programming languages, databases and web server platforms they offer - UNIX, Linux, Windows or even Macintosh - as you might already have preferences for on any of those things.