Web hosting reviews

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 hosting, sometimes referred to as “virtual hosting”, is where most people start out. In this arrangement, the same server or computer is shared by many different web sites. All of the sites have their own individual slice of data storage capability, and they are securely separated from other sites on the same drive.

Most people who are publishing personal or home business sites will do just fine with shared hosting. These sites typically have moderate traffic levels and don’t use a lot of file transfer resources, as a heavy multimedia (video) site would. Thus, their demand on the server at any given time is likely to be low.

In a shared hosting arrangement, if any one site suddenly explodes with traffic or starts running a large number of high-bandwidth applications (such as video), it can negatively affect the performance of all the sites on that server. Bandwidth is the amount of data that you can transfer to and from the website.

As an example, let’s assume someone has a site selling a product, and they put a video on the home page that automatically starts playing when someone visits the page. Then, they buy advertising on highly active traffic exchanges, which results in other people hitting their page very frequently. Each time someone hits the page, it starts loading the video. This is unusual activity that can drag the performance of that server down and affect other sites on the same server. Good hosting companies have people online 24 hours a day watching for things like this, and making adjustments accordingly.

Great news - shared web hosting isn’t expensive any more. It is very affordable for almost anyone. You can get reliable hosting for 5-10 dollars a month, which was unheard of a few years ago. Prices have dropped considerably. Go for a month to month plan at first, to see if your host’s support and performance is acceptable. If it is, you can sign on for longer periods at discounted rates - an even better deal.

An attractive feature of many good hosting plans is the availability of site building tools that make it simple to create a decent site. These are nice, but be careful to find out how they work before you build an entire site with one. Some will create a standard site that can easily be downloaded and moved to another host someday if desired. Others are tied into the actual site in such a way that moving out is more difficult. Perhaps not a big deal for most, but something to check out. Best thing is always create your site with tools that are not part of the hosting site itself.

For most people hosting personal or small business sites, shared web hosting is the most practical solution. You get everything you need in abundance, and you always have the option to upgrade your plan to a dedicated server should your site expand and require a higher level of service.

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