The next concern for you after designing and developing pages is to get your site hosted on the Internet. But with so many companies offering various types of packages - shared web hosting, dedicated , managed , which type of hosting should you choose?
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 service and what are the advantages and disadvantages.
What is shared web hosting?
Shared web hosting service is a convenient and economic way of sites if you do not require extremely high performance and high bandwidth. As its name suggests, in shared service, the server that hosting the 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 server is shared by hosting many different websites on it, companies providing shared 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 providers will not compromise on any kind of security and performance issues on the shared hosting servers. Moreover, shared 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 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 resources.
Let's examine the advantages and disadvantages before you consider shared service:
Advantages of Shared Web Hosting Service
Economical: As many websites are hosted on a single server, providers are able to offer low cost shared services. In general, you can expect to pay $5-10 per month for shared web hosting services. Today, due to stiff competition in the industry, you can even discover many companies offering huge space and bandwidth (as high as 1000 MB disk space and 40 GB bandwith).
Convenience: Shared 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 business and let these professionals worry about the maintenance and uptimes.
Customization: Even though web resources are shared, web masters can manage their website using control panel or similar tools provided by the company. They are free to upload files, remove pages, add database, check statistic and etc. Also they are allowed to create domain name specific e-mails accounts.
Efficiency: Today, shared service comes with space and bandwidth that are more than sufficient for small business websites. However, you can always add more resources should you overrun the space or bandwidth usage.
Disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting Service
Slower Responses: Given that a physical server is shared, websites have to accept slower server response time if compare to dedicate server hosting.
Reliability Issues: In most cases, 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 server. Your website would have to suffer downtimes and inaccessibility as a result.
Sharing Issues: Moreover, you just need one "bad" website in your 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 is more risky and opens up potential security issues as other masters having an account on the same server could hacked to your sensitive data.
Before you decide to ink a deal on shared , be sure to consider all the pros and cons of shared web hosting services above. After all, selecting a right services may be one of the most critical business decisions for your online business.
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