subject: Shared Website Hosting - 6 Things To Consider [print this page] Today,there are so many website hosting companies offering various types of web hosting packages - shared, dedicated, and managed hosting, it is very hard to know what hosting plan to choose. It can be downright overwhelming.
Which type should you choose?
If you are a small business owner or a webmaster or someone who wants to host a site, and cost is a major concern - go for shared hosting. It is probably the best break-entry situation into a web-hosting account. But before you make your hosting decision, let us first learn what shared hosting service is. Shared means that the same server hosts more than a single website. It is very common today that you will find hundreds of websites hosted on a single server. And depending on the quality of the server and its performance, your website should operate at maximum efficiency.
Shared service is an easy and cheaper way of hosting web sites if you do not require extremely high performance and high bandwidth. Even with so many websites hosted on a web server, you can be rest assured that the web hosting providers will not compromise on any kind of security and performance issues on the shared hosting servers. Before you go in for shared hosting, consider the following 6 items:
Things to Consider When Choosing a Website Hosting Provider
1. Go through some sites already hosted on the server to see the response time. If the sites take very long to load then probably your server is overloaded. Test them at different points of time. However the difficulty might be in finding sites on that particular server.
2. Usually shared server is economical. Verify this. In most probability, you can expect to pay $5-$10 per month for shared web hosting services. Today, due to stiff competition in the web hosting industry, many web hosts offer unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth.
3. Go in for a shared web servers managed by professionals who are highly skilled with specialized knowledge of the field. You might want to see how long the company has been in business. In such a case you can concentrate on your web business and let the professionals worry about the maintenance and uptimes of the web server. It is always a smart move to sign up with a reputable web hosting provider.
4. Do your homework to find out the reliability of your host and check past performance as well as uptime assurance etc. You want the highest uptime reliability possible.
5. In shared web hosting you just need one bad website in your shared web server to get your website banned altogether by the search engines due to shared IP address. Anyway you can always pay a little extra to get a dedicated IP address and avoid this problem. Having a dedicated IP might well be worth the investment if you are serious about your web site, but if you are a beginner, I would not worry about this too much. I sort of believe the search engines will ban the bad websites domain name before banning the whole lots of sites. Shared Web Hosting is pretty common out there and a great place to start.
6. Consider all the features that come with the package. See if you are really getting what you are paying for. Before you decide to sign a deal on shared web hosting, be sure to consider all the points mentioned above. After all, selecting a right web hosting services may be one of the most critical business decisions you will be making for the success of your online business.
