Every website on the web needs a hosting service. Essentially a web hosting company gives a website a place to reside called a server so that people will have access to it any time, day or night. There are two types of web hosting, dedicated and shared.
How Does Shared Web Hosting Work?
As the name suggests, shared hosting is web hosting that is shared by several websites. This type of web hosting has its benefits and drawbacks. Mostly ideal for personal websites and small businesses because the cost is much lower than a dedicated server. A dedicated server is used only by one larger company.
What are the Benefits?
The main benefit of shared hosting is the cost. A small business can have its website hosted for as little as $5 to $15 a month. Unlike a larger company who could pay up to $400 or more monthly for a dedicated server to host its website. The second benefit is less maintenance. With shared web hosting, the participants don’t have to worry about keeping the server running. Like renting an apartment, each resident pays his or her fee to have the grounds etc maintained. There is no technical knowledge is required with shared hosting.
When you choose a shared hosting plan, your website data is stored on a server shared by other businesses. However, your business can’t access files for any other business. The server distinguishes between the two businesses by a URL or a domain address. When someone types in the URL for your business, the server redirects him or her to that partition of the server assigned to your business.
Shared Hosting Considerations
You may have already guessed that with shared hosting that means shared bandwidth, which can mean slower performance. That’s why most hosting pricing is based on bandwidth and space on the server. That means the more you pay the more disk space and bandwidth you could have.
Security Issue
The security issue with shared vs. dedicated hosting is no comparison. With shared hosting there is a greater security risk because it is a shared server. If one site is compromised, the potential for all sharing the same server to be compromised is greater. In addition, if one site is conducting dishonest behavior it could cause the entire server to be shut down causing every business on that shared server to be shut down too.
