Shared Web Hosting, Is It The Right Choice For You?
Shared Web Hosting, Is It The Right Choice For You?
Shared web hosting is a low-cost web hosting option for those websites that are in their infancy. It is better to begin with the shared web hosting in the initial stages, especially for the beginners with few technical skills.
The vital aspects of the web hosting, for example, the security, installation of scripts, tweaking the servers, and other advanced webmaster functionalities can now be delegated to the web hosting company’s service and support departments, while leaving you with the job of solely designing and promoting your website on the internet.
Although the shared web hosting has its drawbacks, it is still a better option for all the newcomers who are struggling to get their presence felt on the internet through their websites. Shared web hosting service gives you the online platform to present your website to the millions of web surfers at a very low cost. The shared web hosting service is also fully backed with great back-end service (at the web server level) that you would need as your website grows in popularity and web traffic.
What is meant by ‘Shared Web Hosting’?
Shared web hosting is also known as ‘Virtual Hosting’ or ‘Shared Hosting’. Shared web hosting service hosts many websites on a common web server. This disk-space sharing between many websites makes it possible to give you an economical option to host your website and begin your online presence, especially if your website is a small personal or business website with static web pages.
The shared web hosting has some drawbacks and can restrict your website if the site is filled with graphics, videos, audios, and some resources-hungry scripts.
The advantages of the shared web hosting service are many. You should explore these advantages and decide if shared web hosting is the right choice for your website hosting needs.
The Advantages of the Shared Web Hosting
Obviously, the primary advantage is the low cost of hosting. This economical option is made possible because as the web server’s hard-disk space is shared between many websites, they all also share the overall expense of server maintenance cost and other related costs, including the cost of server uptime. It is, therefore, the excellent and extensive web hosting features are made available even at a very low cost.
The next advantage with the shared web hosting service is that you get all the technical support by the web hosting company’s support and technical teams. The well-known control panels like the cPanel, Plesk, Helm, etc. are fully capable to help you control the various aspects of scripts installation, web designing and development, statistical feedbacks, uploading and downloading files, backups, and website maintenance. The cPanel has wonderfully helped millions of websites through its easily manageable advanced features.
‘Fantastico’, a script installer that is included with the cPanel, can quickly install a blog website, a shopping cart, a forum, and many other types of software easily. It takes care of the difficult technical tasks of installation of these softwares. The very popular blogging softwares like the Nucleus and the WordPress can be easily installed through the Fantastico without requiring you to possess related technical knowledge.
You can also easily install content management systems (CMS) like the Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, FAQMasterFlex, Mailing list (PHPList), Polls, Surveys, Site Builder, and plenty of other scripts without the need of extensive technical knowledge to help build a great website at a very low cost.
Another advantage is that as the critical aspect of website’s maintenance is undertaken efficiently by the web hosting service, you can solely focus on the more important aspects of building your website and promoting it on the internet.
The above are few of the advantages of the shared web hosting service. The following are some of the disadvantages that also need to be considered by you while choosing this shared web hosting service for your website’s hosting needs:
The Disadvantages of the Shared Web Hosting
As the web server is shared between many websites, the web server becomes extremely crowded and there is a fall in overall server performance. It is common to have hundreds of websites sharing a common web server. The good hosting company will always limit the number of websites sharing each web server, while other service providers will add many more websites to the server to drastically increase their profits. It is, therefore, necessary to ask the hosting company how many websites are being placed on their shared servers before availing their shared web hosting service.
Shared web hosting adversely impacts the web server resources like the bandwidth, memory, multi-tasking, and other vital resources. Even though the modern server technology can easily take care of these functions, the multiple websites hosted, some consuming huge server resources, on a single web server can severely limit these server resources.
If, for example, some websites that are hosted on a single web server receive a lot of web traffic to their sites, then those websites will utilize most of the resources, and thereby restrict the resources that are available to other shared sites. This can result in slight delays in downloading your own web pages on the visitors’ computers. These slight delays can still annoy your web visitors as they wait impatiently for your website to load.
As the web server’s resources are limited for each website, you will have to upgrade to a better web hosting solution, for example, a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a Dedicated Web Hosting, if your site grows in popularity with many web visitors visiting your website daily.
Another major disadvantage with shared web hosting is that your website depends up on other websites’ consumption of server resources. If those websites consume many resources, or if they cause the server to fail due to running malicious scripts, then your website too would be down until the web hosting company’s service team restore the service back to normal. This downtime will severely affect the availability of your website to the web surfers and to the search engine crawlers, affecting the indexing and popularity of your website.
These factors can also make the web server unstable, and rebooting the web server is required to make the server stable once again. These are common disadvantages of the shared web hosting, and it is necessary to understand how efficient the hosting company’s service is, before utilizing its shared web hosting service. Still it is good to know that due to the severe competition and the advent of highly advanced web technology, most of the web hosting companies have good service teams working round-the-clock, and they constantly monitor their web servers for any such problems.
As the multiple websites sharing the shared web hosting share the common IP address – also known as name-based shared hosting, the problems of IP banning, and secure certification (SSL) can become a great issue for your website. If some offending website on the shared server causes the search engine to block its IP address, then all the websites sharing the shared hosting would also be banned unnecessarily.
Nowadays, the search engines block a website by only the domain name, and not by IP address. Still, this issue of IP banning can cause difficulties to your website too. SPAM messages sent by the offending website can also cause the shared IP address to be blacklisted by the ISPs (Internet Service Providers), and can cause your email to be blacklisted unnecessarily because it shares the same IP address as the spamming website.
As the shared web hosting cannot grant you exclusive SSL certificate, the only option left with you is to have your own IP address if you have an ecommerce-based website. Your web hosting company can provide you greater assistance in getting over this problem.
After evaluating the advantages and the disadvantages of the shared web hosting service, you should also think of the time when your website outgrows the shared web hosting needs. As your website becomes more popular and gets thousands of visitors, and also when you upload it with more graphics- or video-intensive web content, it then becomes important to upgrade to the VPS or the dedicated hosting plans.
Most of the web hosting companies will provide you with plans that can easily upgrade your website to a VPS or dedicated hosting solution, but if they cannot, then your only choice is to transfer your website to another web hosting company.
This changeover can cause your website to become unavailable to your visitors for a while. Hence, it is very important to think of all such issues before choosing your web hosts, especially if you plan to create an advanced website with many features like the ecommerce, extensive graphics- or video-based website, or a business website that has a growth potential.
The shared web hosting is a great option for all the personal and small business websites that contain mostly the static pages. If you have a low budget for your website’s hosting, then this option of shared web hosting is best for you. You can easily upgrade to other better hosting options when the need arises.
Select a web hosting company that is dedicated in providing the best service and round-the-clock support, even to their low-cost shared web hosting service plans. You can easily find such web hosting companies by verifying the various reviews, and even by joining their forums and reading the various posts relating to the service provided to its customers.
The acid-test of the efficiency of the support team and the service lies in how quickly they respond and restore the web hosting service. There are problems associated with the web hosting, especially the shared web hosting, but the best web hosting company will always rise to the occasion and give their customers the best service and the satisfaction. Select such web hosting company and your website will be assured a long and trouble-free online existence!
