Choosing the right type of hosting for your website is very important to ensure that a website is available as often and as quickly as possible. The wrong type of web hosting can hamstring your website and prevent it from ever being able to reach its full potential.
But for those who are new to web hosting services, all the jargon and specifications can be daunting at first. The good news is that choosing a web host is actually fairly simple once you know how to cut through all the fog.
What is Shared Hosting?
As the name implies, shared web hosting involves sharing resources on a server with a number of other websites. Every user who hosts a website on the server will be given their own dedicated storage space on the server, but the resources of the server will be shared among all users.
While sharing the resources amongst all users on the server, it is still possible to ensure that each user always has access to a certain minimum level of resources at all times.
What Are the Advantages of Shared Hosting?
The biggest advantage of a shared hosting package is that it is cheaper than the alternative. Renting a dedicated server can represent a significant cost for an individual or small business, especially when a shared hosting server would easily meet all of their requirements.
Lots of people make the mistake of assuming that shared hosting isn’t powerful enough to accomplish anything meaningful with, but this isn’t the case. For example, with SSD hosting, shared hosting packages can provide read and write speeds that are much faster than traditional HDD-based servers.
Another advantage to shared hosting is that the server overall is still managed and maintained by the hosting company. With a dedicated server, you will be responsible for keeping it functioning and healthy. This can be a difficult task in itself, especially for those who have never managed a server before.
What are the Drawbacks?
Naturally, there are some instances where shared hosting isn’t the right choice. There are also some limitations to the approach itself.
For one thing, if the server crashes, it will bring down all the websites stored on it. Many hosts operate live backups, so they can easily restore connectivity to any servers that become unavailable due to a server crash.
Performance on shared hosting machines is naturally less powerful than dedicated hosting. Some websites will require extra power server-side, in which case, dedicated hosting is going to be the best option.
Another factor to consider when deciding between shared and dedicated hosting is the security of the server. Whereas dedicated servers tend to come with guarantees and warranties to protect the data stored on them, shared hosting tends not to offer these.
For websites that don’t require a significant amount of power on their servers, shared hosting is often a good option. Websites with very high traffic might need to opt for something bigger, but this is a leap that you should only make when there is a clear case for doing so. Otherwise, you could end up massively overspending on your web hosting.
