Tips for Choosing a Shared Web Hosting Plan
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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.
Shared hosting, sometimes referred to as “virtual hosting”, is where most people start out. In this arrangement, the same server or computer is shared by many different web sites. All of the sites have their own individual slice of data storage capability, and they are securely separated from other sites on the same drive.
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.
In a shared hosting arrangement, if any one site suddenly explodes with traffic or starts running a large number of high-bandwidth applications (such as video), it can negatively affect the performance of all the sites on that server. Bandwidth is the amount of data that you can transfer to and from the website.
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.
Many hosts offer site creation tools. These tools make it easy to design and publish a respectable web site from scratch. One thing to be careful of – find out if the site creation tool is proprietary to the host. In some cases, these tools are tied in with the actual site in such a way that moving to another host would be difficult. Others are standalone and the site you create is like any other, and easy to move if desired.
In conclusion, I believe that shared web hosting works well, and is the best solution for most users. For just a few dollars per month, you get more space and options than you’ll probably ever use. There is always the option to move over to dedicated hosting later, if your site grows large enough to warrant it.
Are you trying to find the best hosting plan for your website? Get the scoop about the economical plan that works well for almost all webmasters – shared web hosting.
