Shared Web Hosting – Your Best Option?
Are you confused trying to sort through all the various web hosting options? Don’t feel bad, you are not alone. This decision is often hard because of all the choices you have. Right now, let’s consider the shared web hosting option, as in most cases this is your best bet.
Almost everyone starts out with shared web hosting. This is the most economical way to host your site. In this arrangement, you are sharing space with hundreds of other sites on one particular server. All sites on that server share the disk storage space and bandwidth for that server.
Most people who are publishing personal or home business sites will do just fine with shared hosting. These sites typically have moderate traffic levels and don’t use a lot of file transfer resources, as a heavy multimedia (video) site would. Thus, their demand on the server at any given time is likely to be low.
In a shared hosting arrangement, if any one site suddenly explodes with traffic or starts running a large number of high-bandwidth applications (such as video), it can negatively affect the performance of all the sites on that server. Bandwidth is the amount of data that you can transfer to and from the website.
If you have a lot of visitors downloading or viewing video or other files on your site, that can use more resources than the web host has allocated for any one individual site. Good hosting providers are always on the lookout for spikes in activity, and will step in and do whatever it takes to balance things out.
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.
An attractive feature of many good hosting plans is the availability of site building tools that make it simple to create a decent site. These are nice, but be careful to find out how they work before you build an entire site with one. Some will create a standard site that can easily be downloaded and moved to another host someday if desired. Others are tied into the actual site in such a way that moving out is more difficult. Perhaps not a big deal for most, but something to check out. Best thing is always create your site with tools that are not part of the hosting site itself.
Bottom line – shared web hosting is the best choice for most people, and offers enough flexibility and options for almost all applications. Just be sure to check out your host carefully before you sign up. The competition for web hosting is very fierce, and there are lots of garage or basement servers trying to make a buck this way.
