How To Choose A Shared Web Hosting Service?

By Mike Hasselhoff


The kind of hosting plan you use is dictated by several factors, the most significant of these are the size of your project and your budget. The budget should be considered first because "underpaying" for an account will put you in a position where your project will probably fail. Think about this real world example: You are going to move some furniture, should you pay for a compact car or a more expensive truck? The compact car can get you from point A to Z but strapping a couch to it is going to be a problem and in the short term will probably result in you paying more for repairs than you would have paid for the correct vehicle. So that compact car is best when used to move 1 or 2 boxes around. It is the exact same thing with hosting accounts. If your project is huge, then you need to spend a little to get the return you want. If you're getting going or you know the size of your project is limited, then a shared hosting solution could be justified.

Shared web hosting is simply that - Shared. There are plenty of purchasers on the same hosting server all fighting for the resources of that server. Any one customer's actions could affect the balance of site delivery time and cpu performance for the other users on that hosting server. A good hosting provider monitors their hosting servers closely to be certain that all of the hosting accounts are playing together nicely and, like a schoolyard monitor, are on the look-out for hosting accounts that might be abusive or not acceptable for shared web hosting.

The initial step in finding quality shared web hosting is asking hosts how many people are on their shared hosting servers and what their CPU and ram allotments are on those hosting servers. A dual core machine with 4 gigs of ram can support about 50 users; 8 gigs of ram 100 users. A quad core with 8 gigs 150. In our view, there should not be more than 150 hosting accounts on any one server. Monitoring accounts and consumer interactions gets almost impossible over 150.

Hosting features are crucial too when selecting, but don't be swayed by features that you don't need. It is great that hosts offer unlimited e-mail boxes but if each account on a shared hosting server utilised even 100 mailboxes fully, that hosting server would crawl to a halt. Only request and purchase what you want.

It is always possible to upgrade! This is a very important fact. Shared web hosting, unlike many other types of web hosting, is expandable. A host can add more storage space or bandwidth use to your hosting account. Find out before you decide on a hosting company what expansion plans are available because you "will" need to grow as the years go by. It is better to expand in one place than move all over.

Ultimately, evaluate how long a host has been around. There are tons of hosts on the internet : too many! Some operations come and go, some belong to another party, and some are fraudulent. Reputation and years in service are wonderful things to have a look at. If a host has been around a few years, it's a safe bet that they'll be around for a few more. Get reviews, compare and most critically do not jump at the cheapest plan which catches your eye. Quality is vital.




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