Shared Servers Explained

The next concern for you after designing and developing web pages is to get your web site hosted on the Internet. Web hosting companies offering various types of web hosting packages – shared or virtual web hosting, dedicated and managed web hosting. As a general rule, shared web hosting is the way to go if you are a small business owner and cost is your major concern. But before you make your hosting decision, let's first understand what shared web hosting service is.

What is shared web hosting?

A shared web hosting service refers to a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site "sits" on its own partition, or section/place on the server to keep it separate from other sites. Virtual hosting is a method that servers use to host more than one domain name.

Shared web hosting service is a convenient and economic way of hosting web sites if you do not require extremely high performance and high bandwidth. As its name suggests, in shared web hosting service, the web server that hosting the web pages are shared by many other websites.

The number of websites on a shared hosting server can go up to thousands at times. Due to one large and high performance web server is shared by hosting many different websites on it, web hosting companies providing shared web hosting service could offer them at an economic rates.

Even with so many websites hosted on a web server, you can be rest assured that the web hosting providers will not compromise on any kind of security and performance issues on the shared hosting servers. Moreover, shared hosting web servers are operated, monitored and maintained around the clock by IT professionals to ensure minimum server downtimes.

Technically speaking, shared hosting servers are run on Unix or other multi-user operating system and each website hosted on the web server is given a separate account in the operating system. Typically, websites hosted on shared servers are given a shared IP addresses and allocated a fix amount of web resources.

Advantages of Shared Web Hosting Service

Economical: As many websites are hosted on a single web server, web hosting providers are able to offer low cost shared web hosting services. In general, you can expect to pay $5-10 per month for shared web hosting services. Today, due to stiff competition in the web hosting industry, you can even discover many web hosting companies offering huge web space and bandwidth (as high as 1000 MB disk space and 40 GB bandwith).

Convenience: Shared hosting web servers are managed and maintained by professionals who are highly skilled with specialized knowledge of the field. As a result, you can concentrate on your web business and let these professionals worry about the maintenance and uptimes of the web server.

Disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting Service