
It is a good decision to opt for paid hosting services with a reliable web hosting company that offers shared, virtual private server and dedicated server hosting plans. These web hosting plans are characterized by their own pros and cons. Shared hosting is the most suited web hosting plan for a beginner webmaster.
Pros of Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most common choice of web hosting among webmasters nowadays. The most important advantage of shared hosting is that it is cheap. The majority of the webmasters choose shared hosting because they are attracted by the affordable prices. Shared hosting is the cheapest and most basic form of web hosting. If you want to host just one regular sized website or a few smaller sites, you should find that shared hosting will meet your needs. Shared hosting is available in different sizes of disk spaces and bandwidth. If you sign up with a reputable web host, you should not face any problem with your shared hosting plan. The web host should guarantee 99.9% uptime and offer 24/7 customer support.
You don’t have to worry about any problems the server has. This is because the web host will be responsible for fixing all the technical problems of the server. You don’t need to be knowledgeable in maintaining a server as the web host will maintain it. All webmasters will be given basic access to their cPanel account to upload files, check email accounts, check AWstats and etc. With the cPanel, you can easily install various types of scripts such as WordPress, forums, ticket systems, etc. for your website.
Cons of Shared Hosting
It is quite important to know that shared hosting has a few disadvantages as well. One of the major disadvantages of owning a website that is hosted on a shared server is that you will not be in a position to use specialty functions when you want to include new programs into your system. In other words you will not be in a position to modify the server you are on.
You will also have limited resources to work with in the case of a shared hosting plan. In short it can be said that you will have to share with others when it comes to using the resources of the server. When the server goes down all the users would get affected at the same time. That’s because the server on which your website is hosted is not owned by a single individual. Overuse of the server resources by a single user can lead to multiple problems for the other shared server users.
Your webpage can load slowly if one of the websites on the server happens to use too many resources. There is a low chance of facing this problem if you sign up with a reputable hosting company that knows how to properly manage their servers. To find out which hosting is reliable, you must read reviews from different review websites. By reading the overall experiences of different customers, you will know whether the hosting company fulfills what it promises. If the hosting company is new, it is recommended that you don’t sign up with them no matter how cheap their prices are. This is because there are no reviews of their services yet so you don’t know whether they can be trusted.
The next step up from a shared hosting plan is a virtual private server (VPS). We’ll get some information about virtual private servers and the level up from that, dedicated servers, up on Linux Depot at some point. For now, learn more about VPS hosting from the guys at VPSPlan.com. They have articles that breakdown elements of VPS, when you should upgrade, and vps reviews of quite a lot of providers.