The Truth behind Shared Web Hosting

If you are thinking of setting up a website, you will have to consider thousands of things before signing the deal. You need to assess your requirements for bandwidth, disk space, memory, processor etc. More than often, the small enterprises with low IT budget choose shared web hosting.

What is shared web hosting?

Shared website hosting is one of the web hosting services where the computing resources of a large server are shared among multiple users on the first come first serve basis. Since the server resources are shared, so is the price of web hosting. This is why shared web server is the cheapest hosting service.You may come across many ads where the shared web hosting providers will make overstated promises by using marketing phrases like cheap (some may even claim free) and Unlimited shared web hosting. Don’t get fooled by those phrases as they are only meant to grab the deal from you.

So, what’s the truth behind these claims of shared web hosting providers?

The truth holds that there is nothing called unlimited hosting. The users always have to decide upon the hosting resources, related to RAM, domain and disk space etc. When they say ‘unlimited’ and ‘free’ for the bloggers and personal website hosting, they already know the fact that these kinds of users will not consume much bandwidth or space anyway. This is why they make such false tricks to grab the deal from you.

So, what should be the alternative?

Shared hosting serves the purpose very well where the user has a personal site and individual interests and if it’s a very small trade. But when it comes to businesses, shared web hosting is not recommended by any expert. The best alternative to shared web hosting is a Virtual Private server. It’s the affordable hosting option in the truest sense with much more capabilities than shared hosting. This too is a shared hosting, but the use of virtualization technology creates an independent hosting environment for each user on the commonly shared server.