Is Shared Website Hosting Your Best Choice For Your Business?
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.
Shared hosting will provide sufficient disk space and resources for most individual, hobby, or small business sites that don't have a lot of traffic or tons of multimedia running on their site. A certain amount of system resources are allocated for all the sites on the server, and they share these resources.
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. If you have a lot of visitors downloading or viewing video or other files on your site, that can use more resources than the web host has allocated for any one individual site. Good hosting providers are always on the lookout for spikes in activity, and will step in and do whatever it takes to balance things out.
The cost of shared hosting should always be very reasonable. Typically, you can host your site (and usually several others) for around $8-$10 per month for basic service. A couple of things you should watch out for:
1) Don't sign on to any long-term deals with a host you are not familiar with. Some will offer special incentives to sign up for a year or two in advance. Wait until you have used their services for a while, and make sure you're happy with them before you commit to more than 1-3 months at a time.
2) If you are not only looking for hosting but also are interested in creating your own website from scratch, beware of the hosting deals where you are offered site creation tools. Some of these are very easy to use and quite appealing, but most are proprietary tools and should you choose to leave someday, moving your site to another host could be difficult. There are lots of excellent site creation tools out there that aren't tied into hosting plans - if you want to use this type of tool, this is your best bet.
Your plans may include building your site into a mega-multimedia powerhouse. If that is the case, you can always upgrade to dedicated web hosting later on. Dedicated hosting simply means your site is hosted on a server by itself, so that high traffic and bandwidth consumption won't affect other site owners (and typically your applications will run faster). Most people just starting out will not need dedicated hosting, but it is a good option to consider up the line, should your traffic warrant it.
One final note. Whether you are using shared or dedicated web hosting, if you are running a business where site "uptime" is critical, consider using a website monitoring service to watch your performance at least for the first few weeks you are on board with a new host.
Most good web hosting companies promise 99% uptime or better, but cheaper hosts sometime experience significant down time because they try to pack too many sites on one server, and this causes the server to slow to a crawl or crash. For business or commercial sites, I always recommend using a monitoring service for a while after you set up with a new host, just to be sure everything is going well.
by: li baocai
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