Shared hosting solutions provide ease of use at minimal cost. Finding a shared hosting package that meets your requirements, provides peace of mind. In my opinion, shared hosting is the proper solution, for most small websites due to the following reasons.
- It meets all the requirements
- It is not expensive
- It does not require Linux administration skills
Affordable : Shared web hosting is the most common, affordable hosting solution out there. It means sharing a physical web server and it’s resources over multiple users. On any shared platform, individual users will have their own limits on bandwidth, disk space, concurrent users, FTP accounts etc. These limits are set to ensure that no users choke the other users on the same server. Performance resources on the physical server are shared between all the accounts of the server. Some of the examples of shared resources are RAM, CPU, Apache server and MySQL server.
Economical : From what I’ve seen, shared Web Hosting is the most economical way of hosting a website. The expenditures are shared by many users and the favourable ratios ultimately trickle down to the end users. The alternatives for shared hosting solutions are always more expensive or high maintenance. In my experience, most users go for a shared hosting setup owing to the affordability factor. You also get server management as past of shared hosting. In a dedicated environment, you would need to manage your server or find a system admin to do it for you. The advantages of shared web hosting outweigh the disadvantages for most users.
Ease of use : When using shared web hosting, all the user has to do is upload his/her website or application, and configure it to work. Almost all shared hosting providers provide an easy-to-use, web-based Control Panel. It makes it quite easy to upload your site, create email accounts and add a database. In shared web hosting, your provider is taking care of the server’s maintenance, and saves a lot of headache, and is therefore the preferred choice for smaller web sites. Whether shared hosting is adequate for you would depend on the requirements of your website or application.
Choosing the right shared hosting package
Most service providers offer multiple hosting packages under shared server. By looking at the resource allocation and comparing it with your requirements, you can easily find a shared hosting package that suits your requirements. For example, for a simple blog, or a small business website, a starter package would be adequate. If your blog or website has more than a few thousands of visitors simultaneously, or if you have heavy data usage (Eg. hosting HD videos on the site, rather than on a video sharing platform like Youtube) then you should consider an Enterprise package. Anything in between would fall into a Professional package.