How to Evaluate a Shared Web Hosting Plan
Posted by: Bob Martindale in Internet, tags: blogging, domain, Internet, shared web hosting, web hosting, websiteShared web hosting is often the best option to choose when you’re ready to put your website online. However, the number and variety of web hosting options can be overwhelming. Let’s try to cut through some of the confusion and see why shared hosting is usually your best choice.
Shared web hosting is the type that almost everyone uses. Each server (computer) that the host maintains will be assigned a certain number of web sites. All of these sites share the resources of that server, and each has an allocated amount of space and bandwidth on that server.
Most people who are publishing personal or home business sites will do just fine with shared hosting. These sites typically have moderate traffic levels and don’t use a lot of file transfer resources, as a heavy multimedia (video) site would. Thus, their demand on the server at any given time is likely to be low.
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 have a lot of visitors downloading or viewing video or other files on your site, that can use more resources than the web host has allocated for any one individual site. Good hosting providers are always on the lookout for spikes in activity, and will step in and do whatever it takes to balance things out.
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.
Looking for the most practical hosting plan for your website? Get the scoop about the economical plan that works well for most people – shared web hosting.
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