Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Shared Web Hosting Secrets

By Bob Martindale

Shared 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.

The average person who creates a website or blog for personal business or pleasure will be quite happy with shared hosting. They typically don't pull much from the server's resources, and don't have huge traffic spikes or heavy file transfer activity that a larger site might.

If any particular website on a shared hosting system suddenly gets a big rush of traffic, it can create some bottlenecks and potentially compromise the performance of other sites on that same server. This is unusual but can happen in certain circumstances.

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.

Shared web hosting prices have come down dramatically in the last few years. For less than $12 a month, you can host several personal sites and have plenty of disk storage and bandwidth allocation. Be careful to sign up for monthly service at first, to see how well the host performs for you. Later, you can take advantage of excellent incentives to sign on for longer periods.

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.

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