Should You Settle For Shared Hosting?

There are a lot of things you're going to need to make a decision about while you're choosing your hosting plan, but perhaps the most fundamental of them is whether you want to go with a shared server, a virtual server or a dedicated server. Shared server arrangements are often plenty adequate at first, though you're likely to want to upgrade to a private server as time goes by.

What Shared Hosting Is

All websites are stored on a server, which is a machine that is properly set up to publish sites to the internet. If you're using a shared server, it means that there are multiple websites on the same machine - sometimes a lot of them. There are various benefits and drawbacks to organising your hosting in this way, and in this article we hope to enlighten you of some of them with the aim of helping you to make an informed decision about what you want to choose for this site.

The Benefits Of Shared Hosting

There are plenty of good things about doing it this way, perhaps the greatest of which is that it's a lot cheaper than most other hosting solutions. You'll save a lot of money by doing things this way, which can make your own hosting and a custom domain much more accessible. It also means that there's a lot less administration to deal with; not so much to worry about in terms of the operating system, or figuring out exactly which set of options you'd like to go for.

If you're new to hosting your own website, you don't have a lot of money to spend, you don't know a lot about servers and web hosting and your site isn't likely to get very large or have a great deal of traffic, shared web hosting could be the perfect solution to your problems.

The Drawbacks Of Shared Hosting

Of course, there are disadvantages as well - as there are with all decisions in this area. The main thing to bear in mind about shared hosting is that it's not going to be particularly fast, and that if your website experiences a sudden influx of traffic you probably won't have the bandwidth to take it and your pages could become inaccessible.

Shared servers can also be more vulnerable to certain kinds of attack, meaning that they're easier to hack and harder to protect from hackers. This is particularly problematic if you're running an ecommerce site, or another site that looks after the personal details of its visitors - you need to protect that information better than that, both by law and as a good business practice.

As well as a lack of bandwidth, it's also true that you're not going to have as much space on a shared server as you will on a dedicated one. If your website is likely to require a lot of storage space - for audio or video particularly - you'll need a different kind of server solution to host it.