The Pros and Cons of Shared Web Hosting

For some strange reason, people have a negative impression of shared web hosting. While there are some sites that just aren’t suited for shared hosting, a great many can use it with no problems. After taking a look at the pros and cons of a shared web hosting plan, many find that it’s just what they need.

The Pros

Shared web hosting is cost effective. If you were to opt for a dedicated server, you could look to pay about $200-$300 a month for a good service. That’s a lot of money coming out of your business. Now, compare that to $5-$10 a month for shared web hosting. The savings really add up.

Shared web hosting is cost efficient. You don’t have any maintenance costs with shared web hosting plans. The web hosting provider handles the upkeep of the servers and they take care of any technical issues that may arise. All upgrades are performed by them and at no cost to the end user, so, basically, they absorb additional costs as a part of their normal business operations.

Shared web hosting plans come with fast setup. When you first order, you might have to go through fraud verification process, which usually only takes a few minutes. Once that’s done, your account is setup within a couple of hours, if not within minutes. If you order a VPS or dedicated server however, you might be looking at up to 3 days before your server is ready.

It’s an effective solution. Shared web hosting is a great option for a new web site or existing one that doesn’t need a whole lot of resources since the web server is being shared with lots of other sites. Once your site begins to grow in terms of traffic or it takes up more space, then you’ll need to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server.

The Cons

Resources are limited. Since shared web hosting puts multiple web sites on one web server, everyone on that server is sharing a pool of resources. So, you never get the full benefit of using the resources of the entire server. If multiple sites are using a lot of resources at once, there may be bottlenecks in the information, although this does not happen very often. Most web hosts will monitor their web servers to make sure that they are running smoothly at all times to prevent issues like this from occurring in the first place. Shared web hosting providers maintain the security of the web server. Since they are hosting multiple web sites on one server, they do their best to keep the server locked down, and so, no one has access to any part of the server, just their own control panel for managing their web sites.

It can be problematic for interactive sites. If you are going to run a forum or e-commerce site, or any other site that requires a lot of database interaction, then, shared web hosting may not be such a good idea. Your site will suffer because of the limits of resource usage.