Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting Plans

Hosting companies offer a wide variety of paid hosting options for its hosting clients. These options include, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, asp.net hosting, coldfusion hosting among others. By far the simplest type of hosting offered is shared hosting.

Shared hosting is the most basic and the cheapest hosting that is offered by all hosting companies. It means that the hosting clients are sharing the features and the resources of the server with many other people from different accounts with the same hosting company.  The features shared include the operating system, disk space, CPU processing, databases, and bandwidth.

Today, the development of ecommerce and the need of many people to make money online, the need for affordable webhosting has increased tremendously.  In large part this has given rise to the concept of shared hosting.

The Advantages

Low Cost – The major advantage of this hosting is the affordability of the hosting type.  For this reason many site owners, of personal and small business sites, will use this type of hosting for their websites. By far the majority of websites online today utilize shared hosting also because it provides a wide variety of features and resources that are adequate for most websites.  The hosting charges for can be as cheap as $3 per month.

Ease of Use – The features that come with shared hosting are generally very easy to use,  so  someone with little or no technical experience will be able to manage the tools of the plan by simply following the instructions – in many cases these instruction involve simply clicks of the mouse. There is a control panel in the administrative area that allows for complex website functions that include creating email addresses, creating databases and many others.

Host of Features – The  hosting plan provides very much the same basic features with many different hosting companies and they include disc space and bandwidth,  databases, unlimited domain hosting, free domain name on signup, 24/7/365 customer service that is reachable by telephone, by email and through chat sessions.  These features come standard with most shared hosting plans and they are the very basic requirements of many websites.

While many websites are adequately serviced by the usual features and resources provide by the shared hosting plan, there are certain disadvantages of this hosting plan that should be noted.

The Disadvantages

Compromised Security – Because there are many sites being hosted on the same server, there may be issues with security that may come up from time to time. It is possible for hackers to attempt to invade your website and cause problems for you and your website.

Limited Resources – The sharing of disk space, bandwidth and CPU power may lead to the servers crashing and data being lost from the site.

Limited expansion – With this plan, you will not be able to use your own personalized software, but only that provided by the hosting company. This fact may limit the growth of you website and the solution would be for you to upgrade to another plan that allows you to use software of your choosing. The options for upgrade may include VPS hosting and even Cloud hosting.

Slow loading – The sharing of server resources  may result in slower website performance and slow loading of the website.

Choosing a hosting company for a shared hosting plan, should be done with careful consideration of the features and resources that you will be offered for the fees you will have to pay. Good customer support and server uptime are very important features you would want to incorporate in a hosting plan.