Top Advantages and Disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting

It is easy to feel overwhelmed when trying to create a website from scratch, as there seemingly are so many variables that need to be taken into account when setting it up. One of the most important considerations is Web hosting.

Choosing a web host that is within your budget and will answer the criteria you have for the desired success of your website are both crucial. That is why you should first understand the differences between various existing hosting types and plans and then act upon them.

This task may seem to be rather complicated at first. But when you break it down, hosting is not as difficult as it first seems to be. After doing just a little research, you will be ready to choose the best hosting plan for you and your website.

In this post, we will focus on explaining the essence of shared web hosting with all its advantages and disadvantages as it is a very popular choice for first-time website owners. Let us begin.

What Is Shared Web Hosting?

Shared web hosting refers to a web hosting service where a single physical server hosts multiple websites. Since many users utilize the resources of a single server simultaneously, their costs are low.

When a website is built with shared hosting, its data will be kept on a server that keeps the information of a few other websites. This means that one and the same server will be responsible for serving up the information of all websites hosted on it. Shared servers can host hundreds of users.

Each customer of the shared web hosting server has access to features like large databases, disk space, more potential monthly traffic, FTP accounts, e-mail accounts, and more depending on the plan. System resources are allocated on-demand and each customer gets a percentage of the RAM and the CPU resources of the shared server.

What Are the Advantages of Shared Web Hosting?

Budget-friendly

Shared web hosting provides a less expensive hosting solution. The hosting company can afford to give a low price due to the fact that all maintenance costs are distributed between many people. Basic plans start at a value of $30 a year and can reach over $100 for premium packages with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, and other benefits.

Simple to Self-Manage

You can manage your website via a user-friendly control panel. The simplified user interface that is provided by the majority hosting providers makes the management process simple, including having a straightforward setup making it easy for users. All administrative tasks and monitoring duties associated with the shared hosting are readily available.

Easily Adjustable

Your new website can begin with a shared hosting plan. One of the benefits of shared web hosting is that it enables you to easily scale up your hosting plan to another that will match your website needs. A clear example is the moment your site registers a significant growth in visit count.

Chance to Host Multiple Domains

Shared hosting is a perfect choice in case you need to maintain a few websites in one directory. You just need to ensure that all domains you purchase are connected to it.

Suitable for Dynamic Websites

Websites that look different depending on the user device are called dynamic websites. This website settlement is especially useful for the creation of mobile-friendly websites.

Popular examples of dynamic websites are Facebook, Twitter, Quora. They all generate a different interface that matches the screen dimensions of the device of each visitor. It is also good that some of the most popular content management systems (CMSs) including WordPress and Joomla support this configuration model. These platforms tend to use various programming languages such as Perl, Python, or PHP, all of which can run on a shared server.

Managed by Professionals

Shared web hosting enables you to let your hosting provider take the headache of maintaining your server. In case you choose a shared web hosting plan, the company will take care of basic server administrative tasks which will definitely guarantee you relatively low maintenance. With Managed Shared Hosting, you can have professional technical assistance for hardware upgrades, maintenance, software updates, DDoS protection, and so on.

What Are the Disadvantages of Shared Web Hosting?

Not a 100% Uptime

One of the main features which you should consider when choosing a shared web hosting service is the guaranteed uptime. The uptime guarantee is important as it promises the yearly runtime of your website, despite outages and attacks. The higher the value is, the more confident your host provider is for giving you a premium uptime.

99.9% uptime is the hosting industry standard and that is usually what is guaranteed with most host service providers. 100% uptime means that your website will always be online but you should be ready to pay the price for this extra. 99.9% uptime means your website cumulative downtime may be eight hours, 45 minutes, and 57 seconds per year.

Speed Restrictions

Since a website based on a shared web hosting plan shares a server with a lot more websites, its speed may be affected by the traffic and resources used by all websites in that network. Most companies which offer Shared web hosting plans try to guarantee speeds, but that is not a concrete metric and also, their server response time may be slowed down by a variety of other issues.

There are many studies that reveal that the average attention of a person is about 5-7 seconds at most. After this time passes, 90% of the people tend to close the window, skip the website, close the advertisement, or whatever they are browsing at that moment. This is the biggest reason why your website should load as fast as possible.

In terms of web hosting, Speed is related to the server response time. The server response time is the time needed for the first byte to be transferred from a server – in order words, the time spent to receive the URL header.

As reported by HRank web hosting rating system, 200-350ms is considered fast, 400-700ms is average, and all the rest can be called slow.

Disk Space Limit

Disk space limit refers to the available hard drive space your hosting plan provides. In the event that you want to build a site with lots of images, audio files, or download media, you should ensure that you have enough disk space available in that hosting plan. After you choose a shared web hosting plan, please be advised to monitor the amount of disk space provided by it, as well as the bandwidth you are using via your main control panel.

Limited Customization

Shared hosting is not a suitable choice if you have any technical requirements. This type of hosting does not allow users to use customized software or do much tampering and adjustments.

Is Shared Hosting a Good Choice?

In short, yes, it absolutely is. Shared web hosting is the most budget-friendly way to get a website running online due to the fact that many other people contribute to the cost of the shared resources. For that reason, the individual prices for users are cheap. This type of hosting is really good for a small website or а blog that does not require advanced configurations or high bandwidth. Reports on the web hosting market show that it is the second-fastest-growing segment of the web hosting industry with a growth rate of 10.4%.

Is Shared Hosting Slow?

That depends on the number and the size of different websites hosted on the shared hosting platform server. If most of them have low to moderate traffic then the speed for all sites should be good. However, if another website that uses the same physical server as you, reaches an unusually high volume of traffic, your website can experience slowdowns.

The needs of your website should also be considered. If your traffic grows exponentially then you should upgrade to a higher plan or another type of hosting like VPS. Otherwise, your website can register speed issues.

Websites with considerably high traffic need a dedicated web server, provided by a web hosting service or maintained in-house.

To sum up, Shared Web Hosting is suitable for your website if you:

• Want to start a small business website or a personal blog for friends and family
• Want to keep costs low
• Have an operating small business or start-up and want to present it to online customers
• Have little to no experience with web hosting
• Do not need access to extensive web programming
• Are studying applications like WordPress and Joomla
• Want to experiment with web design and coding

Most of the shared hosting companies provide similar offers. So how can you choose the one that best matches your needs? Of course, you should consider all the available features and compare prices. The most important factor to consider is the reputation of each hosting.

Shared Web Hosting – Summary and Conclusion

Shared hosting is one of the most affordable solutions for tiny to average-sized websites. This kind of organizing allows users to share one server and run different Websites on it. It is the best solution for small businesses. Still, if you plan on building something significant, you should better take into consideration going for a Dedicated Web Server, VPS, or Cloud Hosting service right off the bat.

Before you choose a shared web hosting provider, try reading several reviews, search for different experiences of users, all shared on different social media websites. Also, do not forget to check the comments under articles about shared hosting providers. When you have a better knowledge of the responsiveness and the desire to help customers of various Support teams of different hosting providers you can make an informed decision about which provider to go with in the long run.