Shared Web Hosting Secrets

Written on November 24, 2009 – 8:58 am | by Bob Martindale

If you’re out there looking for the best way to get your web site online, you’ve probably run into some confusion over web hosting. To put it mildly, there are many choices, and for most people the options can be overwhelming. Let’s take a look at shared web hosting, which for most people is the best alternative.

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.

Shared hosting will provide sufficient disk space and resources for most individual, hobby, or small business sites that don’t have a lot of traffic or tons of multimedia running on their site. A certain amount of system resources are allocated for all the sites on the server, and they share these resources.

While this won’t happen with most shared hosting setups, it is possible for one or two sites to experience large traffic or bandwidth usage spikes, which can pull down the performance of other sites on that server.

If you put some really cool videos on your site and promote them heavily, this can result in a lot of traffic and a lot of bandwidth being consumed. Too much of this will affect the other websites hosted on the same server, and possibly cause slowed performance. The top hosts anticipate these issues, and have people on staff around the clock who monitor and adjust things as needed.

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.

If you are also are interested in creating your own website from scratch, be careful with the hosting deals where you are offered site creation tools. Some of these are very easy to use and quite appealing, but a few are proprietary tools and should you choose to leave someday, moving your site to another host could be difficult. There are lots of excellent site creation tools out there that aren’t tied into hosting plans – if you want to use this type of tool, this is your best bet.

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.

Looking for the most practical hosting plan for your website? Learn more about the economical plan that works well for most people – shared web hosting. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.

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