It’s no shock that more and more people are canceling their existing accounts and searching around for more affordable hosting on a daily basis. If you’re looking to minimize your costs and not have to worry about server maintenance, then shared hosting may be the answer for your web hosting requirements.
Tell Me, What’s Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting is a simple, convenient way of starting up your own website, or multiple websites. Being a cheap web hosting solution, it essentially allows more users to share resources on a particular web server. This of course means that some companies will pose limits on certain things such as storage space, allowed FTP accounts, and allowed bandwidth. These limits however, often never pose a problem and often never even come into question.
The idea behind shared hosting is that instead of each person buying their own server to host their sites from, they share one server while still each maintaining individual websites.
Why Shared Hosting?
It’s quite simply, cheap hosting, more reliable and provides better use of resources. The web hosting company is responsible for maintaining the machines and the software in a shared hosting environment. They also have to deal with any security issues that arise and they have to cover the costs of the operating system and other software. You split the running cost of the server with all the other users which knocks back your price dramatically. You end up paying just one tiny, affordable monthly fee.
Shared Hosting. Who Is It Good For?
If you want a presence online, and are trying to save cash each month. shared hosting is good for you. It is great for the small business owner, or someone who would like to run their own personal blog or website. Large companies such as eBay however, require much more resources for their online presence, that a shared hosting environment cannot benefit them.
With shared hosting, from your end it often really just seems the same as any other type of hosting, but you have the beauty of not having to have any technical expertise and not having to spend a lot of money each month. All you need to be concerned with is the upkeep of your website.
As discussed, large companies like eBay who require lots of bandwidth for their sites cannot even dream of using a shared host. Additionally, if you intend on hosting lots of large videos (but why would you when your videos can be hosted for free on sites like YouTube and still be embedded into your site) then you might want to venture into dedicated hosting or the like.
If you like a little more control and have customers that you create websites for, you may opt for reseller hosting instead. It is basically shared hosting with a few extra options, and the potential to make money or at least have your hosting costs paid for by others.
