What is shared hosting? A guide

There are many types of web hosting available. One of the main types of hosting is shared hosting, and this also happens to be one of the cheapest.

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting you can get. It’s that cheap because multiple such accounts share the space on the same server, each with a certain partition assigned at account opening.

It can be the best solution for a small business or an individual to have an online presence without spending a lot of money. Shared hosting can be as cheap as a couple of bucks a month, and even the cheapest shared hosting can be extremely good for most uses. This means that basically everyone can be online, regardless of how much money they might spend.

Now that you know what shared hosting is and how good it is for beginners, you should also know the cons. The main disadvantage of shared hosting is that all the websites on a server share their resources. Every time one of the websites gets hacked or has a spike in traffic, it can happen that it consumes all available resources, causing the server to go down (there are exceptions, for example SiteGround). This means that your website will stop working or slow down, as well as all the other sites hosted together on that server. This may only take a few minutes, but in the case of serious problems, it can last for hours or even days.

That’s why price should never be the only thing that matters when choosing a website hosting provider. A very low price can hide an unpleasant fact: the provider, in its attempt to increase profits despite the very low price, puts too many websites on the same server. As a result, the server becomes unstable and may need frequent reboots, causing your site to go offline every time it happens.

There is a way to find reliable shared hosting: user reviews. This is why you should search the web for such reviews before signing up with any hosting provider. Discussion forums are very useful as many webmasters would post there if they are not satisfied with this or that hosting company. You can read that information and if you need details you can join those forums and ask for them. People are usually happy to help, so you’ll probably be able to find out pretty quickly if a certain hosting company is unreliable or has poor quality services.

Now that you know what shared hosting is and how it works, all you have to do is find a reliable provider. You don’t have to shy away just because your files will be on the same server with hundreds of other websites. If the server is good, if the site loads fast, and there is online support that answers your queries in a matter of minutes, there is no reason to go for more expensive solutions if you cannot afford them at the moment. Go with shared hosting and once your traffic grows you can always migrate to VPS or dedicated servers.