Shared Hosting Guide
If you’re looking to establish an online presence, then you will need some form of hosting. One of the most popular is shared hosting. With this, many different people share a single web server. The server hosts many different web sites which all use the same IP address. If you get dedicated server hosting, then only your websites would be stored on a server.
There are many benefits that entice people to use shared hosting. The most important advantage that it has over dedicated hosting is its lower cost. Many people will be sharing the cost of running and maintaining the server.
This means that you’ll end up paying less to host your websites. In many cases, you can find a basic shared hosting package for less than $10 a month. If you need an upgraded plan, it shouldn’t cost you more than $20 or $30 or month.
With dedicated hosting, you can expect to pay up to three times as much as a minimum. This is usually not an affordable option if you’re just looking to host a few websites with minimal traffic. That’s why most beginners typically opt for shared hosting.
Beginners can often benefit from shared hosting because it doesn’t require a lot of expertise to get started. Many packages offer templates to help users get a basic website up and running as quickly as possible. You may have to configure your own server settings if you get dedicated hosting. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then this can be a real problem.
While shared hosting does offer these advantages, there are a few disadvantages as well. For one, only one server is used to host many different sites. If some sites hosted on the server get a lot of traffic, other websites may experience loading delays. Your visitors certainly won’t appreciate that very much.
Shared hosting also doesn’t give you the ability to use custom software or hardware. You will have to use the same thing that everyone else is using. Again, if you’re just starting out and running a small website, then this shouldn’t be much of a factor for you.
One of the biggest disadvantages of shared hosting is the potential for security concerns. If a malicious program is uploaded to the server, it may affect all of the websites hosted on it. Similarly, if someone attacks the server, then all of the websites will be affected. Your website may even be blacklisted if other website owners that share your IP address engage in illegal activities.
You should certainly weight these benefits and drawbacks when thinking about getting shared hosting. You will also need to choose the hosting company that you work with very carefully. There are certain things to think about when making your decision.
One of the first things you need to consider when choosing a shared hosting company is the level of support they offer. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’ll likely need all the help you can get. Look for a company that offers email and phone support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It’s also important that you consider their up-time guarantee. You don’t want your website to experience downtime much, if at all. Everyone minute that it’s down may cost you money. Therefore, you should join a company that offers a 99.9% up-time guarantee. You can verify this by reading reviews of their past customers. Simply go to your favorite search engine and type the “company name + review”.
When choosing a shared hosting company to work with, you should also make sure that they offer common software packages like WordPress, Joomla, etc. They should also only use current versions that can be installed by the end-user with ease.
It’s good to think about the future when choosing a shared hosting company. Although you may be starting out small, you will likely expand your efforts in the future. Make sure that you choose a package that allows for add-on domains to your hosting account.
If you think that your websites will receive a lot of traffic which can be problematic on shared hosting, make sure that you can easily upgrade to a dedicated server.
One of the next things that you need to look for in a shared hosting company is advanced scripting and database technology. Modern websites often use ASP, MySQL, or PHP, so your hosting company should offer the latest versions of these technologies for you to use.
It’s vital that you take your time and choosing your shared hosting company carefully. It can be a chore changing hosts after you’ve gotten everything up and running. If you don’t know much about the whole process, then make sure that you choose a company that offers plenty of support and guarantees 99.9% up-time.
