What is Shared Web Hosting

Over the past number of years, most of businesses and trade transactions have shifted online and owners must know about shared (cloud) web hosting to be part of this new way of doing business.

In short, every website has a server that stores its files and information, and mostly also processes its email.

The browser requests the information of a website from its server and the server then provides all the necessary information or data to the browser. Even though there are many types of web hosting out there,

listed below are the top three:

• 1. Cloud Hosting, also called Website or Application Hosting
• 2. Dedicated Hosting
• 3. VPS Hosting

To narrow it down further, the most common type used is shared web hosting. Let’s have a look at what it is and what the main pros and cons of using shared web hosting are.

What is Shared Web Hosting?

The answer to this question lies in the name itself. With shared web hosting, multiple sites can utilize a single server.

Each of the websites will have a limited number of server resources such as disk space, traffic, databases, mailboxes, etc. allocated to it. The resources entirely depend on the hosting package you select.

Most of the companies provide similar packages in terms of the amount of space and storage so it is better to choose the company you trust and who you can work with over a long period of time.
In shared web hosting, all the files from several websites are stored on one server.

It is different to the dedicated server in which a single server serves only one website. For this reason, shared web hosting is much more cost effective to the client as dedicated servers are fairly expensive for small websites only.

Advantages to consider

Now onto the good stuff. Shared web hosting is the cheapest and most economical option, the price usually starts from R45.00 to R190.00 (or typically $2.99-$9.99) in most of the cases.

Hosting companies offer multiple levels of hosting packages. You can upgrade your hosting package at any time. Most of the time, shared hosting comes with a built-in Control Panel with a Website Builder or 1-Click App Installer that makes it easier for you to manage your websites.

Technical maintenance is provided by the hosting company and comes as part of the hosting package making it easier for the users who have very little tech skills.

At iStartCloud we use the latest stable version of the world famous Plesk Hosting Control Panels to provide users with a stable, feature rich, and user friendly Shared Hosting experience.

Drawbacks to consider

Shared web hosting with its multiple advantages has some drawbacks too. The load time is slower as compared to the dedicated servers because every shared website only has access to a portion of the CPU and other resources.

The server might get overburdened by the other sites which are sharing the server and performance gets worse when multiple websites start to receive high traffic or CPU load.

Also, having no information about the other websites hosted on the same physical server might pose a risk to your website performance, if not managed.

At iStartCloud we use the latest stable version of CloudLinux on all our servers to isolate websites and domains from each other, thereby overcoming the problem of other shared hosting accounts impacting your account and performance.

To sum up, people who are just getting started have fewer strict requirements and shared web hosting is the best option for them to get started with a lower budget.

As the traffic or CPU resource usage on their website increases, they can easily change/upgrade the hosting package to cater for their website needs.

It is very important to keep in mind that a good hosting company will let you know when you have reached the traffic limit and you need to upgrade the hosting package.