Shared Hosting is the most economical and pocket-friendly hosting solution that caters to the needs of startups and small websites. It offers enough resources and services—ensuring optimum performance, uptime, and security for businesses.
In this article, we’ll answer 5 frequently asked questions about Shared Server Hosting, but first, let’s have a brief overview of this hosting solution.
What is Shared Hosting?
Shared Hosting is a type of web hosting where multiple websites share the resources of a single server. It’s also the most popular way of hosting a website.
There are several reasons for the popularity of Shared Hosting. For starters, it’s the most inexpensive way to host a website. Additionally, Shared Hosting is fast and secure. If you’re new to the hosting world and are starting your first website or if you are a novice blogger, Shared Hosting may be the perfect choice for you.
5 Frequently asked questions about Shared Hosting
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How does Shared Hosting work?
As mentioned earlier, Shared Hosting is a method of hosting where multiple websites share the resources of a single server. These resources include storage, RAM, and CPU cores.
Given that multiple websites have to work using the same resources, there are a few pre-installed scripts and applications that are common to all websites. For example, everyone uses the same operating system.
Having a common platform enables all websites to use the same server resources.
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Why should I choose Shared Hosting?
For starters, Shared Hosting is inexpensive. In fact, it’s the cheapest way to host a website.
If you’re starting a new website, chances are, it’ll take a while to grow an audience. It’ll also take time to add content to your website. So, your website is going to be pretty light and use very few resources for a while.
During this period, Shared Hosting is the best type of hosting to have. It’s inexpensive, fast, and reliable. Scaling your Shared Hosting plan is easy too. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes with good hosting companies. As your website and your audience grow, you can switch to other, more powerful forms of hosting.
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What are the disadvantages of using Shared Hosting?
If your website has a lot of traffic (more than 400-500 views per day), Shared Hosting isn’t enough for you because it’s simply not designed for that sort of usage.
Additionally, if you go with a slightly less reputable web hosting company, you’ll see that your website isn’t exactly the fastest. This is because these companies just cram as many websites on a server as possible.
This means that a lot of websites are competing for a fixed amount of resources. The resources, of course, have to be shared. So, this makes all websites on the server slow. However, sticking to leading web hosting companies should mitigate this problem.
The final disadvantage is that Shared Hosting doesn’t give you much room for nuanced hosting customisation. For example, you cannot just assign or change port numbers of your server, or use root access, and so on.
For most beginners, this won’t be an issue because none of the restrictions hinder you from solving any major issues. It’s just that nuanced control of your server isn’t possible.
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How is Shared Hosting different from other forms of hosting?
Dedicated Hosting is a type of hosting where all the resources of a server are continuously and exclusively assigned to a single website. However, it’s pretty expensive and only very large-scale websites with huge traffic use it.
Shared Hosting is often compared with VPS or Virtual Private Hosting. This is because, in both these forms of hosting, the resources of a single server are shared by multiple websites. However, there’s a key difference between the two types.
In VPS, each website gets a fixed allocation of server resources. So, if you subscribe to a VPS plan with 4GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, and 100GB storage, these resources will be allocated to you and will not be shared by any other website. In Shared Hosting, such a system of isolating resources does not exist.
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Are there any features in Shared Hosting that are specifically geared to beginners?
There are many, in fact. Everything about Shared Hosting is essentially designed to make it easier for a beginner to start and maintain a new website. For example, you get pre-configured templates for your website. You just click on the template you want, and you’re ready to get started.
Additionally, you also get a very simple-to-use dashboard to take care of your website. The most popular one is called cPanel. It’s a GUI (Graphic User Interface) dashboard that’s been designed to make it easy for you to maintain your website.
With other, more powerful forms of hosting, you’ll need some form of technical knowledge about hosting, Linux, and so on. This isn’t difficult to acquire once you’ve dipped your toes in the water. However, you may find them a bit daunting when you’re new.
With Shared Hosting, you also need to know nothing about Linux. As long as you can work on a computer and interact with basic software, you’re good to go. Your cPanel dashboard also comes with an extensive ‘Help’ section, and the forums online are both resourceful and helpful.
So, yes, Shared Hosting is all about making it easier for you to get your first website up and running.
Conclusion
Shared Hosting is the best form of hosting when you’re new to the hosting world. After Cloud Hosting, Shared Hosting is the hosting service with the maximum CAGR of 10.3%. This goes to show the wide popularity of this hosting solution amongst several business types and websites.
You’ll find it easy-to-use and will help you understand websites and hosting better. Of course, as your website grows and traffic goes up, you’ll need to upgrade to more powerful forms of hosting. However, till you have to do that, Shared Hosting is ideal.
When buying a Shared Hosting plan, make sure you buy it from a reputed web hosting company that takes the utmost measures to sustain your business performance and security.
We at HostGator offer the most reliable Shared Hosting plans—ensuring lightning-fast speed and optimum security. You also get an intuitive control panel to make website management easy. So, check out our different plans and choose a suitable solution that best meets your business needs and demands.
