Usually when a person starts their own business, they start to think about the launching of their own website as well. Website is a good way to come into a spotlight of your target audience. But before it can be done, your website should be hosted. Hosting companies offer a lot of hosting options among which you can find shared hosting. So, what does it mean?
Shared hosting
Shared hosting can be called the simplest hosting option. It is very easy to set up and to manage. And because of that you do not have to have some special experience in the sphere of hosting to maintain your website. This hosting type suggests hosting of your site on the server that is used by other sites. It is usually cheap and suites people, who just start their business or already have a small one.
As this hosting is called “shared”, it means that you will share the information of your site, traffic, CPU and memory with the other neighboring sites that have the same IP-address. It means that the performance of the other sites may affect the performance of your own website. For example, if your site becomes very popular and more than 2.000 people visit it a day, it may affect page loading and uptime of the other sites on the server. In this case you can easily migrate your website to VPS and ensure better performance of your site and let the other sites work better.
What are the advantages of shared hosting?
As the performance of a site that has been hosted on a shared server depends on the operation of the other sites hosted on that server, it needs reliable support that would fix all the problems immediately. In most cases hosting companies that offer shared hosting provide 24/7 support to ensure fast work of all the sites on a server.
Although you share a lot of things with the other users on a server, you are able to customize many other things such as your e-mail address and your uploaded images. In addition, it is very easy to maintain, because the users can do all the necessary adjustments in a special application.
As it has been said, there are situations when the site grows and cannot fit the limitations of a shared hosting plan anymore. In these cases hosting companies offer a possibility to migrate to a separate server. It is usually a very simple procedure and does not require a lot of effort.
One of the advantages that can be decisive for many users is its affordability and availability. Almost all the hosting companies offer their clients shared hosting plans and its price is comparatively low. You can find plans which price is even $1 per month. The price is so low, because you share the maintenance cost with the other users, who host on the same server.
Are there any disadvantages of shared hosting?
The main disadvantage of the shared hosting is its limitations. Limitations are the necessary feature of this type of hosting as it helps to maintain fast functioning of the sites on a given server. They include various limitations on a number and type of the connections made to a site. In addition, very often users have CPU load limitations. They help to provide a load balance. Another limitation is a disk storage limitation that restricts the amount of data that you can save.
One more disadvantage of shared hosting is that it can be unsafe at some point. For example, if one of the sites on a given server experiences a security breach, other sites will be affected too.
Who should use shared hosting plans?
Shared hosting is the most suitable option for people, who have small business, and who are sure that their site will not go beyond the limitations of a shared hosting plan. Otherwise, it is better to consider other server options, such as VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated hosting.
Shared hosting has a lot of advantages among which are its availability and low price. Of course, there are some disadvantages such as various limitations, but they are within reasonable bounds and if you assess your needs right, they will not bother you at all.