Shared Website Hosting For Beginners

When you're looking for cheap web hosting chances are the options you're going to come across are all shared web hosting packages. This is one of the only ways a web host can keep their costs low enough to pass on those savings to you. Without shared web hosting you could wind up paying well over $100 per month for a hosting account - so let's be thankful shared hosting actually exists. It means that you can get your websites online for just a few bucks a month.

So what is shared web hosting? Well basically it's when a hosting provider like Hostgator take space on their servers (bandwidth, disk space and a few IP addresses) and shared it between a whole bunch of customers. So instead of having to pay the large monthly fees for your own dedicated server you can split this cost between you and all the other customers that are using this server space.

The beauty of shared hosting is that your hosting interface (usually Cpanel or Plesk)only shows your own websites or blogs when you login. You don't have to dig through everybody elses files to find your own. Then setting up mail accounts, checking web stats, managing MySQL databases is all made very easy through the very visual Cpanel interface. Some companies use Plesk but to be straight here Cpanel is far, far superior - especially for anyone just starting out.

Will you have your own IP address with shared hosting? Well to a certain extent yes you will but that IP will be shared between you and the other customers using the same server share. How many customer? Ahh that is the big question - hosting providers usually don't give this information away freely. What it comes down to is this - the fewer people that are sharing the IP address the better. It just means fewer complications for you and your website(s) will just run faster.

Are there any disadvantages to shared web hosting? This is really down to the quality of the hosting company itself. Some potential problems are the IP address becoming blacklisted because of junk e-mail sent from a domain. For people who care about search engine optimization shared hosting could be a problem if Google/Yahoo or MSN has delisted/banned any sites from that IP range. These type of problems only usually happen with crappy web hosts but it's something to bear in mind.

Now comes the really hard part - finding a shared web host that you can trust, has great uptime and great support. I've spent years jumping through web hosting hoops and dealing with some proper web hosting turkeys (one of them would continually just delete entire websites from their servers and then deny it was them) and I've finally found a few companies that I use on a daily basis and trust with my website traffic (which means money to me - it's my business) and they are Hostgator and Site5 - they both get two thumbs up from me.