Monday, May 9, 2011

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Shared Web Hosting Service

By Annika Reyes


Finding the best host server for your site is probably the most vital ways you take to make sure your website is all set and available to the public. There are several alternatives you can consider: shared, dedicated, or managed web hosting. Here, we will examine shared web hosting in particular and its positive aspects and challenges.

If you are just starting your online business, and it's considerably a small one, then you need to pay attention to minimizing cost. One means of slicing costs in starting your site is to go for the shared web hosting option.

The word "shared" suggests that apart from you, you can find more websites sharing exactly the same web server. This is definitely an economical method to arrange your personal business website since you get yourself exposed to the public but do not need to pay a very high maintenance cost simply because you are sharing the total cost to many other websites. The cost relies on how many you are sharing the service with, and there are websites that can even cater to up to a thousand websites.

Although you are "sharing" your hosting with others, the protection and performance of your site are not compromised. Most of times the host servers operate on a very high performance level that allows them to meet a lot of websites, and good companies will not deal with more jobs than what they are able to work with.

Aside from doing the hosting, these companies also provide maintenance checks on operations and security 24 / 7, by professional IT personnel. They will make sure that downtimes of servers, when necessary, are set to a minimum.

On a technical note, most shared hosting servers use multi-user operating systems similar to Unix or Linux. For every website using the service, there is a relating account in the operating system, so the accounts are segregated and individualized in that sense.

A set amount of web resources are also made available to each subscribing website. The single thing they share is the IP address. Now that we've identified what a shared web hosting service provides, here are the advantages of taking up this choice:

1. It is cost-effective
This is the best advantage of shared hosting over the other choices. Most companies would charge a fee as cheap as $5 and won't exceed $10 a month. Due to the numerous servers competing in the web hosting business, some would even offer you this rate for the usage of a huge web space and bandwidth, sometimes getting larger to 1000MB space and 40GB bandwidth.
2. It is hassle-free
The low-priced monthly fee also includes for IT service. The IT pros who operate the servers are highly skilled in their job of ensuring your site maintained and running well. This leaves you with the gurantee that your internet site is in good hands so you can leave that to them and concentrate instead on improving your website.
3. It is customized
Even with a shared server, each website still has an personalized account, to help you manage your own website using the tools and resources made available to you by the host server. You can design and style your website the way you want it to look. You can also make your own domain name-specific email accounts.
4. It is efficient
The web space and bandwidth provided by these shared web hosting companies are usually enough to service numerous websites. So there's no need to concern yourself for exceptionally slow upload time due to the sharing. At a later time, once your needs increase, you will find the option of adding more resources as well as additional cost.
To make sure you understand what you're getting yourself into, we are also going to inform you the disadvantages of this service:
1. It has slower response time than the dedicated server hosting.
This is only to be expected since you are utilizing the same server with other sites.
2. It has stability challenges
Occasionally, it cannot be helped that other internet sites sharing together with you will run a malicious program or malware that can overcome the security of your server, and this can render your internet site unavailable: all you need is one "bad" website to make your shared IP address (and thereby your website) prohibited by ISP or search engines.
3. It is not as safe as dedicated web hosting services.
Sharing your website with strangers increases the risk for hacking.




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