Affordable Web Hosting - Shared Web Hosting Explained

You have designed your web site, and have all your content ready to be hosted, now all you need to do is decided on the type of hosting required for your site, but with so many hosting companies offering various types of web hosting plans based on shared hosting, dedicated hosting, mangaged hosting, and virtual private server hosting, which type of hosting do you choose?

Shared Web Hosting - What is it?

Shared hosting is an economic way of hosting web sites where you do not require high performance (CPU workload) and high bandwidth. As the name "Shared Hosting" suggests, the server that is hosting the web pages is shared between many users, this is how web hosting providers can sell web hosting space at affordable prices down to as low as $3-$4 a month, many accounts on one server spreads the cost of the server among many users. Whereas a dedicated server can cost upwards of $100 per month.

With many web sites hosted on a web server you can be sure that web hosting providers will not make any compromises on performance issues, they will also not make any compromises on security, as one web site with a security issue could affect all other sites on the server, for this reason shared servers are monitored and maintained 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by IT professionals to ensure minimum downtimes.

The Advantages of Shared Web Hosting

As many web sites are hosted per server, hosting providers are able to offer very competitively priced shared hosting plans. For shared hosting you can expect to pay $3-$8 per month for shared hosting services, with some providers offering up to 20,000MB of space and 1TB of bandwidth within in this price range. This is amazing value, thanks to competition web hosting is now within the reach of the personal web designer or hobbyist, and not reserved for just businesses with large budgets.

Shared hosting web servers due to their nature need to be maintained round the clock by highly skilled IT professionals, this lets you concentrate on managing your web site, you can leave all the other things related to web hosting to the professionals.

Shared hosting web masters can manage their web site using what is commonly known as a control panel to manage their hosting, this allows you to add domains, monitor statistics, create databases, manage email addresses and all manner of other things. Each web hosting provider varies what facilities are made available to you in their control panel, but thanks to fierce competition between web hosting providers these days the differences between each providers feature set is decreasing.

Todays shared web hosting service comes with enough disk space and bandwidth to be more than sufficient for small businesses, and if you ever need resources than what your current plan offers you can always upgrade as your web site grows in size and popularity.

David J. Smith writes about Dreamhost and other prominent web hosting providers at Webhost Advisor