By far the most cost effective method to get your website on the net today is to use what is known as shared hosting. Shared hosting is where a web hosting company rents you a certain amount of disk space in which to store the files that comprise your web site and permit you a certain quantity of bandwidth (ie. the information transfered between your website and your guests browsers) in exchange for a monthly fee. Typically speaking, the more you pay the more web space and bandwidth you will get.
There are even deals around where you’re offered ‘unlimited’ disk space and bandwidth for a extremely small sum of cash each month. Lots of folks are pleased with what they get, but , many others have found out when really attempting to use substantial amounts of space or bandwidth that if it sounds too good to be true then it normally is!
One of the features of a shared hosting account is that, because it’s name implies, you are sharing the disk space and bandwidth with tons of different users. As I’m certain many will appreciate, when an application is thrashing your hard disk on your own PC, or using up a lot of memory, then your PC slows down noticeably and will seem to grind to a halt at times. Well, this situation is just about the same with shared hosting. You’ll find yourself on a server with other users who have memory or CPU intensive applications, or popular sites that have tons of visitors, which means lots of disk activity. The end result is that the responsiveness of your website suffers.
An additional drawback with shared hosting is that you will be unaware of who precisely you are sharing with. If you discover that your site drops suddenly in Google that may be because you have done something Google doesn’t like. Alternatively it might be that the IP address you are sharing with all the other sites on your server has been recognized as a cause of spam or malware.
So what’s the solution?
Well many people are OK with taking the risks related to shared hosting, but for others some type of cheap dedicated hosting provides a coffee value answer to their problems. You will would like to make a decision if you need Linux server hosting or Windows server hosting, but that call ought to be driven by the applications that you wish to run, as they will almost certainly be Windows only or Linux only.
A virtual dedicated server is the next step up from shared hosting and will cost you a bit more money. With a virtual shared server you still won’t have a physical server all to yourself, but you will have much more control over your hosting environment and you’ll remove nearly all of the problems related to shared hosting, and you’ll have your own IP address. For the small amount extra (it will be usually around $twenty – $30 a month extra) that a virtual dedicated server costs this is often a worthwhile investment.
