Shared Accommodation

Shared Accommodation

This is the most common form of web hosting available. A company sets up one or more servers to be used for web hosting, and their customers in turn pay for a portion of that server and share it with other guests. Thus, a server may be responsible for several hundred sites at a time.

Shared hosting offers many advantages. It is the cheapest form of commercial accommodation, such as the cost of the server may be offset by the many customers who can use it at once. They do not require any technical knowledge to use and you only need to administer your account - at no time did you have anything to do with the server. As a paid solution, you will have access to customer support, contract, availability guarantees and so on.

The disadvantage is that as you share a server with other customers, you are also sharing the resources of that server. The server, like a home PC, has only so much memory, CPU and disk space, and if other clients make heavy use - or if the host has put too many people on the server - or even if the server ISN 't particularly fast in the first place! - You might well find that your website seems to be slow.

 You will also find that Shared Hosting does not allow many powerful and advanced features that high-end options present to you. There is a slight increase in security risk, too, that you can never be sure how secure your 'neighbors' are - but keep in mind that the server will be very secure in the first place, and the risk is not something to be alarmed about.

 So our friend Dave starts with a web hosting package very simple, with a little web space and a database. He installs Wordpress and starts to blog seriously, and then decides he wants to start his online business. With his basic account he controls a web design company to build him an eCommerce site, with his blog built in as one of the features. As his store grows, he finds that he can expand his site fairly easily, without having to worry about limitations as he had with the ISP.

 Shared hosting is the ideal solution for most sites and users. With few exceptions, only people who want their own server and / or control over the content of it will need anything else. So Dave, like many people, is perfectly happy, until he decided to leave his day job and go full time with his eCommerce site. At this point, Dave, who is a bit more knowledgeable about Web Hosting now, considers if there is anything he can do to improve its site.