Shared / Virtual Web Hosting

(Standard shared hosting)

This is the most common Types of web hosting. In the previous section we talked about cheap web hosting; this is more of shared web hosting offered cheap through some compromise on features or tech support. Here we are looking at standard shared hosting with full features.

With shared hosting, your web site is hosted on a powerful server along with many other web sites. On a shared host it is common that each web site have their own domain name. You might or might not be allowed a static IP address and the features and the price vary widely.

Shared solutions often offer multiple features like email, database, and many more options. Technical support tends to be good.

Shared web hosting example hosts:

Tierranet | Webhost4life | Lunarpages

Advantages / disadvantages of shared web hosting.

 Good:  Bad:
Low cost. As we mentioned wide variation is seen in the cost. An evaluation is often needed to ascertain the right host. Difficulty in judging the tech support quality is the primary issue here. It’s great with some and very hard to obtain with some others. Landing in the right host can be plain lucky.
Good for small & large businesses and traffic. Price vary widely as per traffic & features chosen.  Often they impose restrictions on traffic volume.
However, this is not an issue for most moderate
traffic sites.
Multiple feature options.  Database support is not wide ranging.
 Own domain name can be used to host site. Security may be compromised due to many sites being hosted on one server.
Tech support is available and it is often very satisfactory. Since all sites are hosted on one server if any site has a bad code etc… Whole server may be affected. If any site has huge traffic, others can be affected. However with good hosting company’s everything is monitored and remedial action taken, round the clock.

Summary:

You must understand that shared web hosting is what you are buying most often when you are in the market for web hosting schemes. This is, as we mentioned the most common and popular method for web hosting. This is also a simple method as buying and beginning the process of web hosting is made very simple.

There are literally thousands of providers for shared web hosting. It is safe to go with some well known names and we urge you to gather basic idea about reputation through alexa tool bar rank of the site. However they can only tell you the sites popularity on the Internet. However that’s often a good enough indication of how good the organization could be.

Next : Dedicated Web Hosting

Quotable Quotes: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”