The Two Sides of Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most cost effective way to get a website of your own, thus the main reason why it is so popular among personal users and small to medium sized businesses. So why is shared hosting so affordable? It’s rather simple. Multiple users are hosting their sites on the web server and essentially sharing the costs. Despite the convenience and cost-efficiency, shared hosting often gets a bad rap. In this article we will share some of the concerns and cover the advantages and disadvantages that come along with the shared server.

The Good Side

Not only is shared hosting more affordable, it also enables the easy management of your website. Unlike a dedicated hosting environment, you don’t have to worry about the technical challenges associated with maintaining the server which generally includes updating the operating system, installing software and other tasks. This is all handled by the web hosting company who basically gives you a pre-installed platform already configured for client-side management.

The Bad Side

The factor that makes shared hosting so great is the very thing that presents drawbacks. The nature of this environment can result in problems to every site hosted on the server. Even if one site on the machine experiences a sudden burst in traffic or makes a critical scripting error, the available resources of every other user could be impacted to a point where their sites become incredibly slow or completely inaccessible. While this is very inconvenient for someone trying to run a successful business, reliable hosts constantly monitor the performance of their web servers for such problems. This gives them the ability to quickly address issues by temporarily shutting down the machine and performing the required maintenance.

Another disadvantage of shared hosting relates to the limitations you are forced to endure. What you get is what you get, which is generally a certain amount of bandwidth and disk space, databases, scripting languages and a couple of pre-installed software applications. So what happens when you want to utilize a particular script or program that is not available on the server? Nothing. You simply miss out. This can present numerous problems as the average shared host simply cannot structure their service to benefit a single user. When coupling the fact that so many providers are overselling their service with unlimited this and unlimited that, you have a situation that may not be worth the incredibly low price after all.

The Determining Factor

In the end, a reputable shared hosting company is really all that matters. When doing business with a company that has established a proven track record, you can host your site in confidence and cater to thousands of visitors everyday. In order to ensure a smooth performance, we suggest looking into a provider and finding out about how many sites they a running on a single server. Additionally, you should look for signs of reliability in the form of a respectable uptime and customer support in case something does go wrong. If everything is intact, you can enjoy all the benefits of an economical web hosting service without much worry about performance and security issues.

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