Shared Hosting Services

Shared Hosting Buying Guide

What is Shared Hosting? Why should you buy shared hosting? Why shouldn’t you buy shared hosting? What features do you look out for when making a shared hosting plan choice? What are the common red-flags to avoid? What are the viable shared hosting options out there?

You want answers? Then read on…

Shared Hosting: What is it all about?

Let’s understand it this way. Servers for hosting everything on the web cost a lot, are expensive to maintain, and are a pain to administrate. For a random person looking to set up a personal website or blog, for example, the cost and administrative requirements of getting and managing a server may not be justified.
Shared hosting is the solution for you or anyone looking to start off on a project or try out an idea needing web hosting, to split the expenditures necessary to run a server and split the resources of a server. Novel idea right? I think so too.

Do I need Shared Hosting?

The short answer – Yes, if your hosting needs are modest. The lengthy one – You have to weigh up different parameters of hosting needs. The rule of thumb is to take up shared hosting if you are new to web hosting and/or are not looking to create the next big thing that would drive in lots of website visitors and require lots of space to host web content.

So you have to answer the following questions. How much web content am I looking to host now and within a 6 months period? What will be the traffic size (number of web visitors) within this time period? How well do I know about web hosting? Answers to these questions will be pointers to deciding if you need shared hosting or not.

Prospects of Shared Hosting

So, you’ve vaguely decided that shared hosting is an option you might want to explore, but can’t wrap your head around what you stand to gain from it. In effect, why use shared hosting?

Here are a few reasons:

• The least expensive offer on the table - If your principal concern is how much you have to cough out, then shared hosting is the way to go.
  
• Easy administration - You will get access to use a control panel from where you’d easily make changes, often as 1-click solutions. You may not appreciate it, but this means you wouldn’t have to worry about bug fixes, updates, patches and kludges.
  
• Multiple hosting - You will be able to host many websites (if that is in your plans) on one shared hosting plan without having to break the bank.
  
• More bang for bucks - Shared hosting also gives you valuable perks such as email services, subdomain hosting among others.
  

Constraints of Shared Hosting

So you’ve heard the good stuff, what about the not-so-good stuff?

• Limitations - This is a no-brainer, but wait till you receive a mail from your hosting provider about the need to upgrade your subscription plan or have your service cancelled. That might sound dramatic, because it’s a good thing for your traffic to necessitate an upgrade. However, you may not always be on the same page as your hosting provider as to when to upgrade and what the fair usage limits are.
  
• Downtime and outages - This is not unique to shared hosting, but it is rampant with shared hosting. Why? Because, there’s a lot of management that goes into ensuring that each person on a shared server gets his/her money’s worth. Sometimes, catching up may present a challenge which results in an outage. The endpoint: your website becomes unavailable to visitors.
  
• Long loading time - Do not expect the fastest load time on a shared server. Why? Shared resources.
  

Marking a checklist: What to look out for in a shared hosting plan

You’ve decided to take up shared hosting. You then discover there are literally a bazillion web hosts out there, with various offerings at various price points. How do you trim the number?

By noting the following:

Hard Drive

First thing to note: there has to be a number. Unlimited hard drive disk space is a myth. When you find a number, it will usually be in MB (Megabytes) or GB (Gigabytes). You then have to guesstimate the size of the files you will have to upload. The recommendation is for the disk space allowance to be marginally larger than your guesstimated value.

Bandwidth Allowance

This is a term to measure the limit to the amount of traffic you can have, often in a one-month period. The larger the better, but as with the hard drive disc space, an unlimited offering is impractical, so find a number.

Customer Service

Timely responses that effectively address a message sent is important in shared hosting. You have to be sure that when you hit a hurdle, need technical support or want to make an inquiry; you’re going to get a reply that’s on time and answers your question.

Downtime

This describes how often your website goes offline and is unavailable to visitors. In a typical shared hosting plan features list, it is denoted by a percentage value of uptime (which by definition is the opposite of downtime). You are often going to see a value between 99% and 100% uptime. The most reputable shared web hosts can meet these benchmarks.

Server Upgrade and Transfer Options

It’s good to have options to call up for when it’s time to grow or when hosting services received begin to hit a new low (it happens). Ascertaining that upgrades proceed seamlessly and within a reasonable length of time as well as having open transfer options before committing to a shared hosting plan, could save you a ton of stress, time and cost in the future.

Renewal Prices

You’ve probably come across a $1/month hosting offer with reasonable offerings that you don’t want to pass up. Before giving out your credit card information, do your due diligence to know what the cost of renewals are. A surprise might be lurking around

Control Panel

Most reputable shared web hosts give you access to a control panel as part of the feature-set of a shared hosting plan. This is usually cPanel or Plesk. For what it’s worth, make sure either of those are on offer, custom control panels are not always the easiest to use. Millions use cPanel or Plesk and there’s almost no probably no problem you’d encounter that doesn’t have a solution plastered somewhere in the web. If there’s no control panel, do yourself a favor and skip the web host.

Add-On Services

Is there 1-click install of WordPress? Can you host mails? If yes, how many? How many sub-domains can you have? How many domains can you host on a single plan?

These add-on services are there to meet your tailored needs. These frills may mean all the difference between two good alternatives.

What else do I need to know about shared hosting?

Third-party opinion matters

You’re going to hear horror stories of popular web hosts and pristine experiences with obscure web hosts, but there has to be a third-party opinion to vouch for the services of a web host before you take up a web hosting plan.
Influence of web hosts on shared hosting

From pricing, plan offerings, service delivery to customer support; web hosts can make all the difference between thinking highly of and recommending shared hosting or rebutting its value at every chance you get. Web hosts with shared hosting plans worth trying out include: HostGator, BlueHost, iPage, Arvixe, MediaTemple, DreamHost, GoDaddy.

Read the fine print

I don’t like doing it, I’m not sure you do; but you just have to do it. It may be the terms and conditions or an information on the web host’s page typed out in small font.

Limits and caveats in service delivery are often stated in these bodies of text, and you’d do well to know and agree to them before going with a web host.