The important thing to be considered after designing a website is about hosting our website in a reliable server. There are different types of web hosting services like reseller web hosting, managed web hosting, dedicated web hosting and shared web hosting. For a beginner, it can be quite confusing to choose the right hosting plan.

As a simple rule, shared hosting is a very good plan for small business since cost will be major concern for them. But before making the hosting decision, we should aware of the pros and cons of shared web hosting.

Shared Web Hosting:

Shared web hosting is the most economic and convenient way for hosting web sites with very good bandwidth and performance. Shared web hosting is the hosting plan in which many websites are stored in a single web server. There can be 1000s of websites on a single web server and each of them shares the storage space. Due to high performance web server, the performance is not affected and the cost is also reduced. Also, with shared web hosting, the web servers are maintained and monitored by IT experts to ensure maximum uptime.  Shared hosting web servers run on Linux or any other multi-user OS and every website will have separate login to the OS.

Benefits  of Shared Hosting:

Cost: Since shared hosting is done with single server, the cost is very low. We are supposed to pay around 5-10 USD every month for shared hosting services. Due to very high competition in the hosting industry, many companies offer discounts and very high bandwidth (1 Terabyte) and web space around 40 GB.

Easy Maintenance: Since shared hosting is done in a single server, the maintenance is quite easy which is done by skilled IT professionals. We need not worry about the downtime, since they will operate and maintain the servers properly.

Also, it is easy to customize the web site, using the CPanel offered by hosting service provider. Uploading files, adding and editing database, analyzing web statistics are all easy with the control panel. Also, the performance and efficiency is very high and is suitable for small business users.

Drawbacks of Shared Hosting:

High Response Time: The response time of the server is high since the web server is being shared by many websites.

Reliability: Though the servers are maintained by experts, many websites using malicious scripts or software programs which can corrupt other websites and bring them down. Such risks are high with shared hosting when compared to dedicated hosting.