The Advantages Of Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the best solution to choose for most small and medium sized websites. There are several advantages to choosing shared hosting. The biggest advantage is the cost. Compared to hosting on dedicated servers, shared hosting is much cheaper and affordable.

You can buy a web hosting package that fits your business needs most. There won’t be any need for you to sign-up for an all-inclusive account if you won’t be using most of the services.

Shared hosting can also be very advantageous for the web hosting company, because it can host hundreds of small and medium websites on one single server. This will diminish the installation and maintenance costs, and will give the hosting company a higher investment return.

Nevertheless, before you decide to host on a shared server you should make sure that the company makes use of state-of-the art servers with a high power for processing. These servers should be connected to the Internet on high speed bandwidth lines in order for there to be no choking when the traffic spurts.

The hosting solution should be in scale with your website’s needs, and should also be able to accommodate your needs as your site expands. The web host must also offer 24x7 toll-free technical support rendered by knowledgeable and technicians who are professionally trained.

You should also ask for references before signing up with a hosting firm. You will also need to consult other webmasters who decide to run sites on the same server. It will be a good idea for you to browse through these websites and find out what the response time is during the peak and non-peak hours.

You will especially need to verify whether the hosting company owns servers or is reselling hosting solutions. Reselling hosting solutions won’t appeal to your needs due to the fact that the web host is only a middleman and therefore not able to control the solutions he is selling. You might find sometimes that the services which are provided don’t live up to the promises made.

You must always have a plan for backup just in case your web host goes bankrupt. This should take into account the maintenance and backup of all the data you post on the web site. You should also have administrative control over the domain name right from the beginning; and your host should only be listed as a technical contact.

You should also verify the nature of other sites which are hosted on the server. Try to steer clear from web hosts who host adult sites. This kind of shared hosting has two disadvantages. The first one is that adult sites generally tend to attract high traffic and habitually corner a large part of the bandwidth. The second disadvantage is that they come to share their IP address with your site. This might be troublesome if some search engine chooses to blacklist all the sites which are hosted on that IP address.

Article Source: http://www.webdesignarticles.net.

About the Author:
Nora Roberts is a contributing editor at http://www.webdesignarticles.com/. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.