Web Hosting

Shared Hosting Plans

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting is a type of hosting where many websites are hosted on one server sharing identical resources. Each website shares disk space, IP address and bandwidth equally per month and any excess is charged accordingly.

In shared hosting, the hosting provider is generally responsible for management of servers, installation of server software, security updates and other aspects of the service with majority of the servers being Linux-based and others Windows-based.

Pros of shared hosting:

Shared hosting is cheaper to maintain and hence very popular with sites that do not have a lot of traffic or for people operating within a budget. This is because the server maintenance cost is shared among all the clients in the shared hosting plan environment.

Shared hosting Plans subscribers find these plans as the most affordable as they can cost less than $10 per month and are packed with interesting features and sometimes, a free domain listing.

Software licenses and installation is handled by the hosting company and thus low startup capital needed. Support is also maintained by the company offering the shared hosting plans.

Cons of shared hosting:

The shared hosting plans providers ensures enough amount of traffic is received by each site in the shared hosting plans environment. So when a particular website receives a lot of visitors, the traffic will respond slowly.

By experience I have found out that if your site has huge amount of traffic, dedicated hosting is the way to go though you may have to cough a little more dollar for it.

Any illegal activity run by neighbouring sites like corrupted scripts or banned script activity like spamming will cause anyone in same server to experience the same.

Shared hosting plans accounts have limited access to the core administrative functions of the server so there is not much you can do where which software is or not installed on the server.

Many Shared hosting plans are preconfigured meaning that you a bunch of scripts and softwares that you don't really need.

There are other types of hosting plans available depending on your needs. They include; Dedicated hosting where you have your own server that you can use according toy your needs this is much more expensive than shared hosting plans.

The cost is actually determined by the resources you need, the more RAM, disk space, processor speed etc the more you it will cost you.So in the end whatever hosting plan you choose whether shared hosting plans or dedicated will be purely determined by your needs.

All the best in your online ventures.

Article Published: Friday 29th December 2006